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MEMOIRS OF A CHILD 



Memoirs of a Child 



BY 



ANNIE STEGER WINSTON 



. 






LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 

LONDON AND BOMBAY 

1903 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS. 


Two Copies 


Received 


AUG 15 


1903 


C Copyright 


Entry 


CUSS3 Ou XXc. No 


COPY 


S 5 
B. 



LBltlS 
,VV7 






Copyright, 1903, 
By Longmans, Green, and Co. 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



TO 
K. S. W. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. The Child and the Child's Earth . . l 

II. People 11 

III. The Garden and a Few Related Things 23 

IV. Divers Delights 33 

V. The Child and "the Creatures" . 42 

VI. Playthings 51 

VII. Portable Property 59 

VIII. Pomps and Vanities 66 

IX. Social Divertisements 71 

X. Conduct and Kindred Matters . . 81 

XI. Dreams and Reveries 90 

XII. Bugbears 99 

XIII. Handicraft no 

XIV. School, slightly Considered ... 121 
XV. Books 130 

XVI. Language 143 

XVII. Random Recollections 152 

Conclusion 16S 



MEMOIRS 
OF A CHILD 

1- The Child and the Child's 
Earth 

ONCE upon a time there was a child 
whom the moon followed when 
she walked ; which seemed to the 
child interesting, but not especially wonder- 
ful, though she wondered at many other 
things. There was no reason to her mind 
why the moon should not follow her ; why 
thunders and lightnings should not mark 
the displeasure of Heaven at her childish 
peccadilloes, or the rainbow shine out as a 
special and peculiar token for good. There 
was in her world no tiresome, inexorable 
Uniformity of Nature. Anything might 
happen ; and whatever happened, happened 
i 1 



Memoirs of a Child 

to her. And yet the child was no egotist. 
She was to herself so little an entity, so 
much a mere bundle of sensations, of re- 
flections from without, that, in looking 
back to see the world through the eyes of 
that child, she herself is of all phenomena 
the vaguest. She becomes merely the 
Child — the incarnate spirit of childhood 
— even while I call her I. 

But what she saw remains in pictures 
vivid enough ; for instance, the very shade 
of the cloudless blue sky under which she 
found herself once alone in an open field ; 
alone, as it seemed to her, in the earth. 
No doubt, she was near the house, and 
under surveillance; but there seemed to 
her to stretch around an immeasurable 
solitude. Suddenly, apparently for the 
first time in her life, she became conscious 
of the sky, of the overpowering immensity 
above her and its awful unbroken intensity 
of blue. A crushing horror and dread 
2 



The Child and its Earth 

seemed to pin her to the spot. She stood, 
a shuddering mite, alone under that stu- 
pendous gulf, feeling that it might descend 
and swallow her up. 

Such a sky remained to the child always 
more or less disquieting; even accusing, 
seemingly, in some occult way, to the con- 
science. Once she and another child were 
gleaning the last few sweet burnished-crim- 
son strawberries of a stripped patch, with 
perfect assurance of the tacit consent of the 
owner, the other child's father, when all at 
once she was aware of that intolerable vast- 
ness of darkling blue above her, and quailed 
with a sudden conviction of wrong-doing ; 
a conviction deepened by an otherwise inex- 
plicable low rumble of thunder. 

Vastness to the child was always more or 
less discomposing. But at home in the 
city the sky never struck her as uncomfort- 
ably vast, though her view of it was com- 
paratively unrestricted. On the contrary, 
3 



Memoirs of a Child 

she would often, in fancy, make it a play- 
ground ; would transport herself thither in 
make-believe so triumphant that the luxury 
of clambering about the delectable cloud- 
mountains remains almost as real as a 
memory. These clouds, she early decided, 
were smoke. Could she not with her own 
eyes see the soft grey and white wreaths 
ascending ? 

The stars, of course, were friendly little 
spangles shining out from the roof of the 
world after the sun went down ; not in the 
least awe-inspiring ; infusing a chastened 
delight even into darkness. One might 
"speak for" any of them which one 
fancied — the Evening Star was the great 
prize — and claim it for the night with a 
very definite sense of possession. 

The moon, as I said, followed the child ; 

but she soon found out that there were 

others whom it also followed. And this 

too must be claimed to be really hers. One 

4 



The Child and its Earth 

must be the first to say My moon! My 
moon! when it appeared in the evening; 
a necessity which brought about one of the 
small tragedies of the child's life. 

One naturally said My moon! in a 
shriek, and more than once, to make sure 
of it. And once in the country — not at 
the place which was to the child par excel- 
lence " the country," but another — the 
child and a playmate were on the front 
porch waiting for the moon to rise. The 
child was the first to see it, and screamed 
" My moon ! " to claim it ; and then " My 
moon ! My moon ! " in pure exultation 
that it was hers. Just then the door 
opened, and the master of the house came 
out, and hushed the child unsmilingly; 
reminding her that a member of the family 
was ill. This was a crushing humiliation 
never to be forgotten. 

The sun to her was not at all the source 
of day, but a mere accessory; its specific 
5 



Memoirs of a Child 

function being to dispel clouds, and so 
prevent rain. Only when its good offices 
were needed to bring about the " clearing 
off " essential to the execution of cherished 
plans was it much regarded. It was too 
dazzling to look at and ponder over, 
except, perhaps, at sunset, and then the 
clouds seemed even more beautiful and 
wonderful. It was only when it loomed 
red, gigantic, shorn of its beams, close to 
the ground in a cloudless sky, that the 
child felt its majesty. 

Upon the whole, it is needless to say, the 
child received the world at its face value, 
quite in the primordial way. Whatever 
looked flat or round was flat or round, 
even after she was more or less aware of 
the Copernican theory. And her attitude 
toward nature was also primitive, tinged 
with instinctive fetichism. There was in 
all things a sort of life, prone to become 
lowering. 

6 



The Child and its Earth 

Trees, especially, were capable of invest- 
ing themselves with awe ; most of all when 
they stood in sombre phalanxes ; an im- 
pression deepened, no doubt, by the dark- 
ness they engendered. Tall dark pines, in 
particular, often seemed to her to stand 
towering aloft in a sort of menacing 
silence. 

Probably their slim tallness contributed 
no little to their effect upon the child, in 
whom there was an antipathy to marked 
height which made it a torture to stand at 
the base of a telegraph pole and look up- 
ward to the top. Nothing in childhood 
remains more vivid than the shuddering 
faintness once caused by a fearful flag- 
pole rising dizzily from the flatness of the 
fair-grounds. To the child, it seemed 
beyond human endurance, and yet she 
could not withdraw her eyes from it, so 
strong was the fascination of horror. 

This, however, was a physical horror, 
7 



Memoirs of a Child 

unmixed with the curious boding sadness, 
the half-superstitious shrinking, so apt to 
be induced in her by contact with imposing 
aspects of nature. It was well that the 
child, while she remained a child, never 
saw a mountain, for the sight would have 
carried with it an oppression which would 
have been absolute pain, an irresistible 
dread and sinking of spirits; well that for 
her the heavenly bodies were so comfort- 
ably minimised. 

In mere width of horizon there was a 
solemnity which, at times became oppres- 
sive; though what that latent disquietude 
peculiar to the country was, the child did 
not in the least understand. She analysed 
it, I think, as Remorse (for general and 
hopeless depravity) , Home -sickness, Appre- 
hension of Snakes. 

Whatever stirred undefined dread in the 
child invariably suggested snakes ; not 
"sure 'nough" snakes, terrible only for 
8 



The Child and its Earth 

their capacity to bite — though the child 
did not at all in her own mind formulate 
the distinction — but mysterious, intrinsi- 
cally fearful serpents, which were realities 
to her imagination only, not to her reason ; 
" moist, unpleasant " creatures belonging to 
the region of " chaos and old night," and 
haunting dark, impenetrable holes and cor- 
ners. For the child was almost as much 
given as an ancient geographer to peopling 
the unexplored with shapes of fear. 

With all its lurking disquietudes, how- 
ever, the child's world was full of enchant- 
ment, of intoxicating beauty. 

" Little birds wake in the morning, 
And sing at the earliest dawning," 

she said to herself one day; said it over 
and over again, and skipped with ecstasy, 
it seemed to sum up so the beauty of 
the world. The words were to her shot 
through and through with the rosy light 
of morning, with the loveliness of apple 
9 



Memoirs of a Child 

blossoms, with the rapture of bird music, 
with the freshness of spring. 

Then there was the surpassing beauty of 
the snow, and the marvel of snow-crys- 
tals ; there were rainbows and sunsets, and 
autumn leaves, whose evanescent tints the 
child would vainly seek to preserve ; but- 
terflies and humming-birds and glittering 
insects; flowers and mosses and trees 
(which were often of a grace altogether 
sweet and smiling) ; translucent pools, 
witcheries of light and shade, and over 
all, tempered at times with moods of 
sternness, the eternal, ever-changing, super- 
nal loveliness. 



10 



PeopL 



2. People 

WITH the same sub-conscious, im- 
personal egoism which marked 
her attitude toward the world of 
nature, the child also vaguely claimed man- 
kind for her own, — instinctively made love 
for herself the fundamental human virtue, 
the virtue without which no other virtue 
was possible. Good people were those 
who manifested kindness toward her, and 
they were good strictly in proportion to 
the degree of kindness manifested; bad 
people were those who were careless of 
the child's feelings, welfare, or wishes. 
The worthy clergyman, for instance, who 
silenced her exuberant claiming of the 
moon, earned thereby a personal estimate 
exceedingly unflattering. 
On the whole, one was decidedly easier 
11 



Memoirs of a Child 

in the society of one's contemporaries than 
in that of miscellaneous adults, who, as it 
seemed to the child, were not to be de- 
pended upon. Few adults, indeed, except 
those nearest to her by ties of blood, and 
one or two who especially petted her, 
played any real part in the child's life, or 
were much considered by her. Broadly 
speaking, the child's world was peopled 
by children. Almost all adults who entered 
it, entered it only as foreigners and aliens, 
with whom no satisfactory medium of com- 
munication existed, and in whose society, 
consequently, there were likely to be un- 
expected and disconcerting developments. 
There was, for instance, a lady with 
whom the child had begun to feel almost 
on terms of intimacy, from her letting her 
sit and watch her paint pictures. This was 
to the child a priceless privilege, the very 
smell of the oil and turpentine seeming to 
her delicious. But one day, instead of let- 

12 



Peopl 



e 



ting her feet dangle as usual from her 
chair, she rested them upon the rung. This 
was luxurious, but not well, perhaps, for 
the lady's chair ; as it struck the lady as she 
chanced to look up. And so she told her 
— gently enough, no doubt, for she was 
fond of the child — not to do that, not to 
put her feet on the chair that way. And 
immediately the child's whole pleasure 
faded, and there remained a sore spot in 
the child's memory. 

Then there was a lady whom the child 
was telling something, incidentally using 
the word raggetty, which was perfectly 
current in her own world ; and the lady, 
instead of listening, told her not to say 
raggetty, but ragged; which effectually 
quenched the impulse to conversation, and 
made the child feel very small and igno- 
rant indeed. 

The child, I think, was quite as exacting 
in her ideal of politeness toward herself 
13 



Memoirs of a Child 

then, as she was afterwards when no 
longer a child. And adult manners struck 
her as, on the whole, imperfect. Grown 
people would whisper and exclude one 
from portions of the conversation. They 
would make personal remarks. They often 
had highly perverted ideas of humour, 
leading them to put one in excessively un- 
comfortable and embarrassing positions for 
their own amusement, and preposterous 
misconceptions of the agreeable in that one 
was expected to enjoy these excruciating 
pleasantries. 

The child, for example, was sent once to 
buy some trifling thing — a yard of cam- 
bric, I think — and given just the small 
sum necessary to purchase it. She asked 
for it at the store, and a very tall old gen- 
tleman measured it, cut it off, and began 
to wrap it up. And then the child, as a 
preliminary to laying down the money she 
had brought, said conventionally, " How 
14 



Peopl 



e 

much is it?" The old gentleman fixed 
his eyes on her very solemnly, and said, 
"Two dollars," to the child's utter con- 
sternation and confusion. And then he 
evidently expected her to laugh when he 
explained that it was a joke! 

One of the few figures that stand out 
distinctly in the very dawn of memory, 
more distinctly even than the child's nurse, 
is the plump, good-natured cook who used 
to comfort the child upon occasion with 
soft bits of plastic, sweet -smelling dough — 
an unfailing antidote to grief. The nurse, 
as subsequent acquaintance assures me, was 
a worthy, but rather phlegmatic person, 
without especial tact or resourcefulness ; — 
she did, however, introduce the child to the 
Tar Baby, as f dimly remember. 

Elderly coloured people, on the whole, 

seemed to the child among the most 

agreeable of adults, particularly those who, 

under the old regime, had belonged to the 

15 



Memoirs of a Child 

family. Some of these had established 
themselves upon the outskirts of the city, 
and would come in from time to time to 
spend the day, bringing offerings of apples 
and peanuts in the bottom of capacious, 
otherwise empty, baskets. There were 
others of this class whom the child knew 
in the country ; and, taking them alto- 
gether, they seemed to her to be delightful 
persons, thoroughly cheerful, sympathetic, 
and tactful, and very happy in their con- 
ceptions of hospitality, especially when it 
took the shape of smoking-hot ash-cakes. 

The child knew, though not intimately, 
two or three rather notable people. There 
was, for instance, a little withered woman 
who came to the house sometimes to do 
some sort of work, which once, at any 
rate, must have involved the use of a 
hammer ; for the solitary remark of hers 
which survives intact is a rather wistful 
reference to such a tool, one presumably 
16 



PeopL 



provided by the family for her temporary 
use. " This," she said, " is a mighty good 
harmer. I wish 't was mine ! " Her unique 
distinction was that her husband had been 
massz-creed by the Indians ; an event which 
the child dimly connected with the mas- 
sacre at Jamestown, and which thus cast 
about the widow the glamour of historic 
as well as tragic dignity. 

Hers, however, after all, was only re- 
flected glory. In the person of one of 
her own uncles by marriage, the child saw 
with horror and fascination, an actual 
victim of the process of scalping at the 
hands of the ruthless redskins. This gen- 
tleman had a perfectly bald and shining 
crown, rendered conspicuous by the dark- 
ness of the surrounding hair. Anybody 
could see at a glance that he had been 
scalped ; and then she knew it, besides, 
because his own son had told her so. 

An interest more pleasant attached to a 
2 17 



Memoirs of a Child 

good-natured Italian confectioner named 
Columbus, whom the child respected as 
the discoverer of America. 

There was a very black man, however, 
named Edmund, — a sort of preacher, I 
think, but in his lay capacity a general- 
utility man about the house, — who, in a 
different way, was still more impressive. 
For he claimed, or so the child under- 
stood, that he could pray for anybody to 
die, and the person would die. This was 
very awful to think of, and made the child 
respect him very much ; though it may 
possibly have been only a grim joke, — a 
specious association of unrelated proposi- 
tions, like the famous sentence current in 
the child's world and designed for the con- 
fusion of the unwary, " I saw a horse-fly 
over the river, and a little dog sitting on 
its tail." 

Then there was the hermit, — a mysteri- 
ous, always silent old man, reputed to be 
18 



Peopl 



e 



a German nobleman, — who lived without 
visible means of support down in one of 
the " gullies " of the city in a shanty con- 
structed as naively and crudely as a spar- 
row's nest, of any worthless thing which 
could be pressed into service, the predomi- 
nating factor being excessively rusty sheet- 
iron. There was a stove-pipe projecting 
from the roof, which added a touch of 
coziness to what already seemed to the 
child an extremely fascinating residence; 
one reflecting a unique distinction upon 
its occupant. 

A very little, decrepit old woman who 
used to go about gathering sticks is an- 
other figure which remains vivid; not so 
much from its inherent interest (though 
the child was deeply and sincerely sorry 
for her) as because she appeared in the 
child's day-dreams as a sort of fairy god- 
mother. For the child had been very 
polite to her, — not, I am afraid, without 
19 



Memoirs of a Child 

ulterior motives, — and had helped her in 
her stick gathering ; and surely this should 
have resulted, according to all precedent, in 
the making of the child's fortune. 

But the really important personages, I 
repeat, outside of her own family, were 
children. What they said and thought of 
things in general outweighed beyond all 
comparison ordinary adult judgment. It 
was they who really made public opinion ; 
they who laid down authoritative laws of 
etiquette and convention. Boys, however, 
did not count. For one was not supposed 
to take any notice of boys. 

Among the little coterie of cousins, some 
visiting and some at home, that would 
gather in the country, the conventional 
thing was to hate boys with indiscrimi- 
nate hatred, — all, that is, except one's 
nearest kin, — and utterly and ostenta- 
tiously to abjure their society. This atti- 
tude the child knew to be mainly a polite 
20 



PeopL 



fiction, a social convention not unmixed 
with coquetry, but it reacted upon the 
imagination, and made one feel something; 
like real panic when flying from possible 
pursuit. 

One day the child and some of the 
other children were playing peacefully in 
a broken-down carriage, when there ap- 
peared upon the scene a cousin a good 
deal older than herself, and a friend who 
was visiting him, from the latter of whom 
the children had consistently flown. One 
boy took his station upon one side of the 
carriage and the other upon the other, look- 
ing in alternately at opposite doors, chant- 
ing a strophe and antistrophe of polite in- 
quiry, one vanishing as the other appeared, 
like figures in a Swiss clock. 

It was very exasperating and confusing ; 

the more so, that these attentions seemed 

to be pointedly addressed to the child, and 

most of all, perhaps, because the child was 

21 



Memoirs of a Child 

conscious of rather admiring the visitor, 
which was treason to convention. So con- 
fusing it became at last that it was not to 
be borne, and the child flew at the visitor's 
rhythmically reappearing head with a sudden 
reckless abandon of resentment which she 
could never afterwards recall without a 
blush. This deplorable occurrence really 
marks an era in the child's life, for after 
that she knew beyond question that she was 
a Spitfire ; which was her first definite and 
distinct conception of Herself. 



22 



The Garden 



3. The Garden and a Few 
Related Things. 

AT home in the city the child played 
much alone in the large grassy 
yard at the side of the house. 
There were crepe myrtles in it, and roses 
of various old-fashioned kinds, and Pyrus 
japonica, whose blossoming thrilled her 
with assurances of spring — whose little 
red cups were full to overflowing with the 
elixir of delight. But the child did not 
think of these as cups when she viewed 
them individually; they were ladies in 
spreading red silk skirts and tight little 
bodices of green. 

Around the yard was a border in which 

there were flowers, perennials and annuals. 

A foot or two of this, taking in a thorny 

climbing- rose, was the child's own par- 

23 



Memoirs of a Child 

ticular garden; one not very sedulously 
cultivated, partly because of an unconquer- 
able horror of earthworms, partly because 
of an artless mental dissociation of cause 
and effect in the realm of horticulture. 

Nevertheless, the garden was the theatre 
of events. For instance, a pineapple-top 
planted there actually took root and grew, 
in a sullen and reluctant way. That pine- 
apple "tree" seemed to the child a rare 
and precious possession — a possession pre- 
cious enough to afford the solemn joy of 
renunciation. It was therefore tenderly 
uprooted and laid upon the sacred altar 
of friendship. A pea vine once sprang 
up in her garden and produced peas — a 
whole pod full at the least — which were 
different to the child from all other peas 
that ever grew, so instinct were they with 
the whole mystery of growth. And then 
the rosebush which was hers " root and all, 
and all in all," brought forth beautiful, 
24 



The Garden 

waxy-white roses which the child looked 
upon with a vague feeling akin to the 
pride of personal achievement. 

There was, however, planted ingloriously 
over toward the kitchen regions, a rose of 
a different kind (or a so-called rose, for it 
was not truly a rose at all), which for 
some mysterious, childish reason she loved 
even better. Sometimes I pass on the 
street car an old house in whose yard is 
just such another bush of vivid yellow dots 
and my heart warms toward it, remember- 
ing the child who so loved its counterpart 
that she devised and coveted for herself the 
name Little Red Bird Sitting on a Yellow 
Rose Bush — which really has an agreeable 
Indian sound. This "rose" was hers in 
some especial and peculiar way, as by right 
of discovery ; for no one else seemed to be 
alive to its charms. There were gorgeous 
peonies blooming in other parts of the 
yard which seemed to her the acme of 
25 



Memoirs of a Child 

mingled splendour and sweetness, but she 
did not love them. She never felt them 
to be in any way her own. They were 
everybody's. Their appeal was universal. 
One could not pre-empt their loveliness, 
and exult over it with the delight of ex- 
clusive possession. One might revel in 
them ; one could not have a subtle personal 
bond as of special understanding. For 
mere sensuous delight she would, no doubt, 
have chosen the peonies ; but one loves a 
flower best, perhaps, as one loves a person 
best, when one's love is not reducible to 
any formula; when it is based on some- 
thing intangible, supersensuous, not to be 
adequately expressed in words. 

Needless to say, the child herself never 
tried to account for the curious affec- 
tion with which she regarded those tiny, 
button-y yellow blossoms — blossoms as 
little beautiful, 1 surmise, as any known to 
botany. 

26 



The Garden 

Perhaps the gold colour held suggestions 
of preciousness. Perhaps the garishness 
of hue gave needed stimulation to the un- 
developed colour-sense. Undoubtedly the 
minuteness of the blooms was an element 
of fascination, as minuteness always is to 
children. The most delightful thing about 
fairies is their delicious littleness, which 
again makes the miniature carry sugges- 
tions of fairyland and so have a double 
charm. At any rate, the yellow rose was 
the child's first flower love. But first love, 
no matter what poets and romancers may 
say, is usually neither discriminating nor 
lasting. First there is Rosaline, and then 
Juliet. 

The child's playground, as I have said, 
was a grassy yard, not kept scrupulously 
trimmed, else it would have been shorn for 
the child of half its delight. Bird-legs, as 
the child in her own mind called a certain 
slim, tall grass with a branching crown that 
27 



Memoirs of a Child 

was really footlike in a sketchy way, ele- 
vated themselves with the jaunty security 
of a man with his feet on his own mantel- 
piece. Vetches were there, with their fasci- 
natingly minute pink-purple blossoms and 
pods of fairy peas, these last being one of 
the staples of the little store which the child 
kept in a corner of the doorway. There 
were the soft, velvety, pink blooms of the 
rabbit's-foot clover also, to play the part of 
commodities, though its precise role was 
never determined to the child's perfect 
satisfaction. Buttercups and dandelions 
flourished unchecked ; and clover, to be 
made into chains ; and peppergrass, whose 
little fiery pods the child would eat with 
the curious, supersensuous relish of chil- 
dren for things that are edible only inci- 
dentally as it were, and for things that are 
aesthetically appealing ; like " sour-grass," 
grass-nuts, the " glue " of fruit trees, the 
drop of honey in the chalice of the coral 
28 



The Garden 

honeysuckle and at the base of the tulip 
tree's petals; and numberless other things 
made enticing almost wholly by extrinsic 
considerations. 

But the purest joy which the yard, or 
even nature at large, perhaps, ever afforded 
the child, came from the unexpected find- 
ing of a tiny blue star which had burst 
from a blade of grass, not different at all, 
so far as the child could see, from the 
surrounding myriads of grass-blades. All 
grass, from that time forth, was different 
from what it had been ; for it all held for 
her the potentiality of a sudden exquisite 
bourgeoning. From any one of a million 
blades might spring, she felt, that bit of 
celestial blue, which seemed to her, never- 
theless, a sort of miracle, a beautiful after- 
thought of nature. This became the flower 
of the child's fancy, the fairy flower, to be 
ever sought, — though found, alas, only 
this once, I think, in all childhood. 
29 



Memoirs of a Child 

This fruitless quest doubtless gave the 
little azure star an added glamour ; but it 
does not explain its unique hold upon the 
child's imagination. Once, in a tangle of 
unlovely growth on the side of a ditch, 
just out of town, she found a wild orange- 
lily growing tall and brilliant, a gorgeous 
flower among weeds. But this — although 
it stamped itself indelibly on the child's 
memory, although she ever afterwards 
sought its counterpart, and sought in vain 
— did not take any especially deep hold on 
her fancy, or catch hold of the chords of her 
heart ; its very gorgeousness, perhaps, setting 
it outside of the range of her sympathies. 

The child found, one day, a yellow toad- 
flax, or butter-and-eggs, growing in the 
yard. This was a treasure-trove to be 
exulted over, not only on account of its 
fascinating peculiarity of a " practicable " 
mouth which could actually be fed things, 
but because it was a wild flower. It seemed 
30 



The Garden 

to her, I think, an interesting coincidence, 
and only a coincidence, that in the very 
spot from which she had cropped this 
blossom she afterwards found another 
exactly like it. I do not think she thought 
of wild flowers as having roots and as 
going through the same deliberate processes 
of germination, growth, and development as 
other plants, but rather looked upon them 
as being impromptu and unprepared for. 

The spontaneity of wild flowers made no 
small part of their charm. They seemed to 
be pure gratuities of nature, half-playful 
largess tossed in one's path, or hidden to 
provoke delightful search. And thus with 
wild flowers was connected that exhilara- 
tion of " finding things " which made an 
Easter egg-hunt so keen a pleasure, and 
even the ordinary looking for eggs in the 
country a thrilling amusement. 

Then there was in wild flowers the 
charm of association. The humblest bios- 
31 



Memoirs of a Child 

som from the fields and woods brought the 
fields and woods to one's inner conscious- 
ness. And the child had times of nature- 
hunger when the mere thought of tangled 
depths of greenery, of " lush grasses," of 
clear little threads of water rippling over 
mossy stones and hung over by feathery 
ferns, was at once a tantalisation and a 
delight. 

None of the garden flowers were to the 
child what the spiky, fragrant, ivory-white 
balls of the button-bush were, and blue- 
bottles, and the little wild white violet, so 
faintly sweet that the child thought that 
she alone knew that it was sweet, and, 
above all, the once found, ever searched 
for, blue-eyed grass. This, to the child, 
was different from all flowers and the 
dearest of all, as the concrete assurance of 
enchanting possibilities latent in the prosaic, 
the every-day ; though she could not have 
analysed her own rapture. 
32 



Divers Delights 



4. Of Divers Delights 

IT is worthy of note, I think, how inde- 
pendent the child — any child — is of 
the tyranny of the senses, how super- 
sensuous his pleasures are. A halo of sug- 
gestion about a flower is more to him than 
beauty; the savour of his especial cates 
and dainties is, as a rule, altogether a sec- 
ondary consideration. 

Green fruit, for instance, really is not 
good; and the child, when he stops to 
think, knows it. It is not for the actual 
taste that he eats and enjoys a grass-green 
apple, or a tiny peach just emerged from 
its nest of rosy petals, but for its tradi- 
tional or ideal taste, and for its association 
with pleasing aspects of nature. They are, 
as it were, symbols of delight. The pleas- 
3 33 



Memoirs of a Child 

ure which they impart is almost wholly an 
aesthetic and imaginative one. 

With a child all of the senses are upon 
approximately the same level; all are to 
be used to make mental connection with 
the outside world; as witness the baby's 
instinctive putting into its mouth of any 
object that it admires or considers worth 
investigating. So to the larger child, to 
eat pretty or interesting things is only 
another way of establishing contact with 
them, or with what they stand for to his 
imagination. Our especial child's pleasure 
in the beadlike shape and deep, lustrous 
brown of chinquapins, and her pleasure 
in eating them were one and indivisible. 
Once, seeing one of her schoolmates eating 
a florid candy-apple, — a creation which to 
adult eyes would have been painfully sug- 
gestive of plaster of Paris, and which was 
rendered yet more inedible in appearance 
by the addition of two or three bright- 
34 



Divers Delights 

green leaves of a tinny nature, — she looked 
upon it, I remember, as a most exception- 
ally charming luncheon. 

And the tinny leaves, I am satisfied, added 
distinctly to this efTect, by the very fact of 
producing an added appearance of inedi- 
bility, and so giving rise to the fascinating 
idea of eating something not originally in- 
tended to be eaten. The charm of the 
unintended plays no small part in child- 
hood. Who that has been a child does 
not thrill with sympathy in the rapture 
which David Copperfield felt at first sight 
of Mr. Peggotty's boat residence? 

" If it had been Aladdin's palace, roc's 
egg and all, I suppose I could not have 
been more charmed with the romantic 
idea of living in it. There was a delight- 
ful door cut in the side, and it was roofed 
in, and there were little windows in it ; 
but the wonderful charm of it was that it 
was a real boat, which had no doubt been 
35 



Memoirs of a Child 

on the water hundreds of times, and which 
had never been intended to be lived in on 
dry land. That was the captivation of it 
to me. If it had ever been meant to be 
lived in, I might have thought it small or 
inconvenient or lonely; but never having 
been designed for any such use it became 
a perfect abode." 

It was in part, at least, the charm of the 
unintended which made the attraction of 
certain favourite play-places. There was a 
garden which the child played in some- 
times, — a sort of Eden it seemed to her, — 
full of great bushes laden so heavily with 
pink roses that the very ground around 
them was carpeted thick with fallen pink 
petals. There was also, in the garden, a 
beautiful white fringe-tree, which made 
the child think of grated cocoa-nut, and 
everything else that was rich and rare. 
And there were divers other delights. But 
the most notable feature of all was an an- 
36 



Divers Delights 

cient box-tree, into whose dusky heart the 
children had burrowed and hollowed out 
a spicy, airless, prickly retreat — a tight- 
fitting boudoir — in whose green semi- 
darkness one might sit precariously and 
hold social converse, sneezing occasionally 
from the dust. 

Another play-place made charming by 
perversion from its original intention was a 
clean, new pig-pen in a grassy spot in the 
country. This was roofed over in some 
way by the children — making sitting obli- 
gatory—and formed a sort of club-house, 
which was the scene of social functions of 
an entrancing nature. The delights of one 
banquet which was served there — the menu 
consisting, I think, of hot corn-bread and 
turnip salad, furnished, no doubt, by the 
friendly cook— stamped themselves indeli- 
bly on the child's mind. For the refresh- 
ments acquired from circumstances a flavour 
which almost entitled them to rank as Viands. 
37 



Memoirs of a Child 

What Viands were, by the way, was to 
the child interestingly vague — beyond the 
fact that they were delicious things served 
at fairy banquets in vase -like golden ves- 
sels, and partaken of reclining on a couch 
in a slim, high-waisted gown with a trans- 
parent veil drawn gracefully over one 
shoulder, or in very long stockings and 
excessively short trousers, as the case 
might be. 

The child knew a little girl in town who 
lived a part of the time in a fairy region 
known as " Up the Country," where, as 
it appeared, there were real gold butter- 
flies flying around; where there was a 
perennial supply, presumably from some 
natural source, of doll -babies completely 
equipped with dresses, bonnets, parasols, 
houses, carriages, and tea-sets; and where 
everybody sat up in trees and ate ice- 
cream. The little girl mentioned these 
circumstances casually in extending an in- 
38 



Divers Delights 

vitation to the child to visit her ; an invita- 
tion which the child ardently desired to 
accept. 

Where the child herself spent the sum- 
mer there was a certain mimosa — one of 
the most beloved of all play-places — which 
would have been an ideal dining-place. It 
was a large, beautiful, climbable tree, full of 
comfortable crotches, and covered in its 
season with the soft rose of innumerable 
filmy peach -scented blossoms; but meals 
were served in the house, at the table, in 
the prosaic way so incomprehensibly dear 
to adults, and not there. 

And other features of the other child's 
rural life were lacking. But even the com- 
paratively tame country which she herself 
knew was full of delights. To the coun- 
try belonged the pleasure, keen, albeit 
chastened and pensive, of maintaining a 
charming little cemetery, marked off by 
three small cedars, and designed for the 
39 



Memoirs of a Child 

decent burial of such downy yellow ducks 
and chickens as succumbed to the perils of 
infancy ; the pleasure of making " dens " 
in the orchard, down under the jungle of 
May-weed, and burying in them green 
apples which would take on an unnatural 
acrid softness, and be much esteemed as 
delicacies; the pleasure of fruit from the 
tree and berries from the bush, and of 
little mossy nooks to make " play-houses " 
in, and of acorn cups and lichens to help 
on the house -furnishing ; the pleasure of 
straw-stacks, exhilarating to climb, luxuri- 
ous to nestle in, thrilling to slide down, — 
and the ecstasy of going barefoot. For 
ecstasy it was; though the eagerly craved 
privilege was for a little while secretly 
regretted — every grass-stalk seeming a 
needle to the tender soles. 

But that passed, and the joys incident 
to shoelessness remained. There was the 
joy of dewy grass; the joy of climbing 
40 



Divers Delights 

trees and walking fences; the joy of 
" making houses " in the damp sand of 
the driveway, by packing it in a smooth 
hard mound over one's foot, which was 
then deftly withdrawn, leaving a neat and 
commodious little mansion, which one 
would embellish further with a front yard 
and a stately cedar or two ; and, most ex- 
quisite of all, the joy of paddling in a cer- 
tain little pebbly-bottomed spring; a little 
spring so clear that it seemed to have no 
depth at all, but which swirled deliciously 
about one's ankles, and even gave the added 
joy of angling. Equipped with a bent pin 
tied to a spool -cotton line, one might act- 
ually have the blissful excitement of catch- 
ing an occasional, guileless, perfectly ap- 
parent crayfish — returning it afterwards, 
agitated but not injured, to be caught 
another day. 



41 



Memoirs of a Child 



5. The Child and "the Crea- 
tures" 

FISHING for crayfish, the child con- 
sidered an exquisite sport ; but it 
was a sport not to be enjoyed except 
in the country. At home in the city, how- 
ever, there was an imperfect substitute in 
the catching of jack -snappers. This form 
of fishing presented the pleasing incongruity 
of being conducted on dry land, — a pecu- 
liarity which appealed to the child's im- 
agination. 

One would see a little round hole which 
looked as unimposing as if somebody had 
merely stuck a slim pencil in the ground ; 
and one would forthwith procure a straw 
or a stout blade of grass and carefully in- 
sert it, leaving one end out. One would 
then sit down, and await developments. 
42 



The Child ©"the Creatures " 

In a minute or two, if fortune favoured, a 
marked agitation would manifest itself in 
the straw or the grass-blade, and one would 
hastily jerk it up, bringing with it into the 
light of day a fat, white, leggy creature, 
from which one precipitately retired. 

I do not remember the child's ever en- 
gaging in the immemorial amusement of 
putting a live coal on a terrapin's back; 
but she knew of this pastime from friends, 
and, so far as I know, she entertained no 
prejudice against it. All that was patent 
apparently to those who had had the pleas- 
ure of experimenting with the problem of 
rapid transit in connection with a terrapin 
was the grotesqueness of the creature's 
sudden abandonment of its appearance of 
infinite leisure for one of extreme and press- 
ing haste. And the child, I feel sure, would 
have seen the transaction from the same 
cheerful point of view. If kind fortune 
had ever thrown a terrapin in her way, 
43 



Memoirs of a Child 

and there had been a fire within reasonable 
distance, she would without doubt have felt 
that it was an almost culpable neglect of 
her advantages if she had not embraced the 
opportunity of demonstrating for herself 
the curious fact of natural history, that a 
terrapin can run " like anything " when it 
wants to. Why the red-hot coal should 
make it want to run, she never especially 
considered. One cannot, of course, attempt 
to explain all the idiosyncrasies of irrational 
creatures. 

Fishing for crayfish and jack-snappers 
was sport for sport's sake ; but in the 
catching, or attempted catching of most 
live things there was, in addition to the 
hunting-instinct, the object of establishing 
affectionate personal relations. Even the 
" Juney-bug " tied by the leg to a long 
thread, and making a whirring bronze -green 
circle about one's head, gave, I think, not 
only the pleasure of a beautiful mechanical 
44 



The Child© "the Creatures" 

toy, but something of the heart-pleasure 
which adults derive from convoying a 
little dog at the end of a string. 

Nothing ever gave the child a more de- 
lightful feeling of virtuous complacency 
than that which would ensue when she had 
partially filled some pretty glass-topped box 
with fresh grass, and tenderly placed therein 
a grasshopper or two that she delighted to 
honour. For what could be more luxurious 
than to live in a glass- topped box ? 

The child had an especially friendly feeling 
for grasshoppers, based upon pleasant social 
relations, and upon something like esteem. 
Notwithstanding the shiftlessness tradition- 
ally ascribed to them, they seemed to her 
in some way meritorious insects, endowed 
with dispositions susceptible to kindness, 
and other homely virtues. 

All creeping things she looked upon not 
only with the strongest physical repugnance, 
but with something like moral reprobation, 
45 



Memoirs of a Child 

even more, perhaps, than she felt toward 
things that sting. It was a distinct draw- 
back to butterflies that they had such 
wormlike bodies. And then, too, in spite 
of their painted wings, it was impossible 
for her to forget that, after all, they were 
only loathly caterpillars which had risen 
in the world. Petting, moreover, when 
it was occasionally essayed, brought about 
a too visible dilapidation ; while with grass- 
hoppers and the little spotted red beetles 
which the child called ladybugs, it merely 
produced a semi -cataleptic state, highly 
gratifying to her feelings as "tameness." 

The child was very kind to ladybugs, 
always placing them, when the opportunity 
came in her way, in situations which best 
showed off their little scarlet coats. Once, 
for instance, she made for one of them a 
beautiful little moss house, leaving it roof- 
less that she might enjoy the sight of the 
domestic felicity which she had provided. 
46 



The Child &" the Creatures" 

The walls and floor were of the softest, 
richest green, interspersed with what seemed 
infinitesimal flowers; and there was in it 
a bit of gleaming mirror, which for the 
time was crystal water. (A fountain in- 
doors seemed to the child the last extreme 
of elegance and luxury.) The ladybug 
itself lent a brilliant touch of scarlet to an 
entourage which the child felt it must find 
quite thrilling. 

But ladybugs after all were deficient in 
animation and responsiveness, and would 
pall after a while. Then one would hold 
them out on the palm of one's hand and 
chant, — 

" Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home — 
Your house is on fire ! Your children will burn ! " 

till the tiny wings would unfurl themselves 
from under their coral sheaths, and the 
little dot of red would take its own path 
through the fields of air, following once 
more its own inscrutable purposes. 
47 



Memoirs of a Child 

Of course, one admired lightning-bugs 
beyond measure, and chased them enthusi- 
astically on summer nights. But anybody 
could catch lightning-bugs. To catch a 
bird, it seemed to the child, would be the 
height of bliss, — an achievement, an en- 
richment, a thrilling adventure, — and, in- 
cidentally, a rather good deed, as leading 
to the amelioration of the bird's natural 
condition, and its introduction to unknown 
luxuries and delights. It was cruel, though, 
she knew, to take a little bird out of a 
nest, "and grieve its mother's breast," no 
matter if the mother bird was rather sel- 
fish and short-sighted to object. 

Once she had an opportunity of helping 
herself to a young bird and nobly re- 
frained, or perhaps some prohibition was 
laid upon her by her elders. At any 
rate, she never forgot the endearing young 
charms of a nestful of baby woodpeckers 
which were domiciled in a tree down in 
48 



The Child ©"the Creatures" 

the orchard; their wide, yellow mouths, 
their little globular stomachs, revealing 
through singularly transparent skin an 
interesting view of the entire internal 
arrangements, the naive confidence and 
appeal of their vociferous greetings — all 
was so wildly dear, so unpossessable ! 

Any grown-up bird, however, one was 
free to catch; and the child knew, of 
course, that all one had to do was to 
sprinkle salt on its tail ; but somehow the 
salt and the bird were never at hand at 
the same time, and the child never caught 
a bird. With affectionate intent she also 
made rabbit traps ; traps which were guilt- 
less of interference with the life, liberty, 
and pursuit of happiness of any rabbit. 

In default of wild things, pigeons and 
rabbits prosaically bought at market en- 
joyed her good offices and the oppor- 
tunities which she provided of becoming 
acquainted with divers comforts and plea- 
4 49 



Memoirs of a Child 

sures to which they had hitherto been 
strangers. And the sense of benefit con- 
ferred made them very dear to the child ; 
so dear that one of the imperishable mem- 
ories of childhood is the grief caused by 
the disappearance of a certain small gray 
pigeon, subsequently found hiding under 
a rosebush in the garden — apparently 
in an unaccountable erTort to make its 
escape. 



50 



Playthings 



6. Playthings 

LIVE things, on the whole, were more 
pleasant to play with than lifeless 
ones; except those, perhaps, that 
made one pretend a good deal, like a certain 
handful of dried peas with which the child 
passed one absorbed and blissful afternoon. 
There was one little mottled pea, in partic- 
ular, which performed some part so thrill- 
ing in the drama enacted that it perma- 
nently endeared itself to memory, though 
its precise role is long since forgotten. 

For bought toys, after the first rapture 
of acquisition, the child, as a rule, cared 
comparatively little ; not a great deal even 
for her dolls; although a certain so-called 
indestructible doll did, for some unknown 
reason, awaken an attachment which lasted, 
51 



Memoirs of a Child 

I think, until she belied her commercial 
name by a violent end. 

Only this doll and one other survive in 
memory with any vividness. The second 
was a small, stiff doll with an unremovable 
china poke-bonnet, whose old-fashioned 
quaintness earned for her the name of Mrs. 
Noah. This bonnet conferred distinction, 
but it acted at the same time as a barrier 
to affection, in that it invested Mrs. Noah 
with a shade of formality and aloofness, 
and prevented her from looking truly at 
home, no matter how unconventional and 
unstudied might be the state of the rest of 
her attire. It also inspired one with some- 
thing of sympathetic fatigue. And there 
were not many pangs when Mrs. Noah was 
broken. 

The most beloved of all dolls, I think, 

was a large paper " infant," to which the 

child was quite ardently attached. Indeed, 

all things considered, it was, perhaps, paper 

52 



Playthings 

dolls that the child really enjoyed most. 
For one thing, one might make them 
dresses by the easiest and most delightful 
processes, — by mere cutting and painting 
and pin-pricking. And then over all there 
was a delicious glamour of make-believe. 

In things which were dolls to the child's 
imagination only, there was pleasure no 
less keen, although more transitory. Single 
hollyhocks, for instance, which could stand 
alone and wear with grace and distinction a 
green leaf shawl ; morning-glories ; syringa- 
blooms ; little pink roses — these were po- 
tential dolls of the most satisfactory nature ; 
perhaps the most fascinating of all dolls to 
play with when one played alone. The 
presence of other people seemed somehow 
to break the spell, and turn them into 
flowers again. 

There was, indeed, peculiar delight in 
playing with things not primarily designed 
to be played with. The child had occa- 
53. 



Memoirs of a Child 

sional access to a physical laboratory, and 
there were things among the apparatus 
which seemed to her far more enticing than 
any possible toy in the most dazzling toy- 
store. There was, for example, a certain 
artfully poised horse and rider which she 
looked upon with exceeding wistfulness. 
There was also a Cartesian Diver which 
she considered would make a most entranc- 
ing doll. 

Bought toys, as a rule, I repeat, gave 
little more than the mere pleasure of ac- 
quisition. Any simulation of life, however, 
made a toy enduringly interesting. A little 
squirming, wooden snake was highly valued 
by the child ; as was a tiny turtle, poised 
on an invisible support, in a small glass- 
topped box, which was in itself a treasure ; 
a little violently swimming turtle, forever 
bound for nowhere ; as though the region 
under that square inch of glass were Look- 
ing -Glass Land, and, as it was with Alice 
54 



Playthings 

when she ran her best in that bewildering 
country, it took all the swimming he could 
do to stay in the same place ! 

Diminutive ducks and fishes which would 
swim around in a basin after a little mag- 
netic rod in one's hand were, perhaps, the 
best of all the " store " toys, for they were 
not only " cute " by reason of their minia- 
ture proportions, and fascinating because of 
their apparent life, but they were in addi- 
tion lovable, because of their manifestation 
of this seeming life in a show of intelligent 
docility. It was easy to think of them not 
only as alive, but as gratifyingly tame and 
affectionate. 

A Noah's Ark the child considered a 
delightful toy; and it was one of which 
she did not speedily tire. There were too 
many permutations and combinations pos- 
sible with the stiff little green trees, the 
vague quadrupeds, and the peg -like people ; 
there was too much scope for a healthy 
55 



Memoirs of a Child 

exercise of the imagination in deciding 
which was which and who was who. 

A kaleidoscope was still more valued and 
longer enjoyed. The beautiful changing 
colours, the exquisite shifting symmetries 
of arrangement, the very way of viewing 
these ever-varying glories through a sort 
of peep-hole, with one eye shut and with 
an absolutely private and personal view, 
gave it a sort of enchantment. 

The child did not know at all in advance 
what toys she would really care for when 
the novelty had worn off ; and very prob- 
ably the toy which of all others she most 
fervently desired would have speedily 
palled, if it had not been, for some now 
forgotten reason, unattainable to her. But 
she looked at it then, I remember, with a 
very ecstasy of longing. This was a white 
plaster tower, something like an un-Lean- 
ing Tower of Pisa, rather more than a foot 
high, perhaps, and with rows upon rows 
56 



Playthings 

of windows, through which the light would 
shine when one placed inside a lighted 
candle. That made its fascination. Seeing 
it so lighted, it was impossible not to think 
of it as furnished and inhabited ; as full of 
life, festivity, and elegance, all on a fairy 
scale, — a rapturous conception not to be 
surpassed. 

In the mere outshining of light from 
within there was something of poetic 
charm ; something vitalising, as it were, 
to an object. This, and the added delight 
of colour made Japanese lanterns, or still 
more perhaps, candle-lit pasteboard boxes, 
fantastically cut out and lined with bril- 
liant-hued tissue-paper, seem to her won- 
derfully beautiful. There was joy, too, in 
the thought that, as one carried them 
around after dusk in one's hand, one was, 
in that deliciously careless way, carrying 
fire in paper — which was thrilling to think 
of. One would have also, I think, a vague 
57 



Memoirs of a Child 

feeling that fire itself had somehow grown 
tame and friendly; and this was very 
pleasant. But for all that, the tower was 
yet more ravishing. 

Once the child saw a walking doll, owned 
by a lady she knew ; saw it, after a good 
deal of preliminary winding and divers false 
starts, stalk entirely across the room, with 
a grim and menacing demeanour, and tum- 
ble down on the other side. But even this 
she did not covet as she did that delectable 
plaster tower ; from which, nevertheless, in 
all probability she would have turned after 
a little space and betaken herself to building 
lordly pleasure-houses of dominoes, as had 
been her wont. 



58 



Portable Property 



7. Portable Property 

TO all children, I suppose, there is 
some more or less common and 
worthless thing in which there are 
believed to lie potentialities of wealth be- 
yond the dreams of avarice. Peach stones 
were invested by the child and the children 
she knew with this vague commercial value, 
and were collected from time to time with 
spasmodic industry ; though they never did 
anything with them, so far as I can re- 
member, except occasionally, in a fit of 
reckless extravagance and luxury, to crack 
one with a brick, and partake of the kernel. 
They were, however, distinctly property. 

But the amassing of peach stones was 

a slow and plodding way of acquiring 

riches. The primrose path of speculation 

lay by way of the little paper prize-bags 

59 



Memoirs of a Child 

which the children called cent-bags, from 
their market price. These were not only 
filled with pop-corn of uniform and un- 
varying staleness, but each held a gift from 
some generous person unknown, which, 
being an uncertain quantity, opened really 
glittering vistas to the imagination. A 
certain blue glass ring which issued thence 
was one of the child's most cherished pos- 
sessions. This, however, was the fruit of 
a friend's good fortune, and not her own, 
which quite invariably took the shape of 
minute pewter or tinsel objects of inde- 
terminate function. 

As a pledge of friendship, merely, the 
ring would, of course, have had no mean 
value ; but the child, besides, greatly ad- 
mired glass. The first of all her treasures, 
in order of time, which presents itself to 
memory, is a small glass bottle, made 
beautiful by being filled with bright -coloured 
shreds and ravellings. These took on, with 
60 



Portable Property 

the smoothness and lustre imparted by the 
lucid medium, an enhanced witchery of 
colour; but the lucidity which they em- 
phasised was, after all, the essential charm 
of the whole. 

Transparency is the great miracle of 
nature, I think, in the eyes of all children. 
Substances which may be seen through 
seem by that peculiarity to be set apart 
from other substances; to be held as less 
material, as more allied to the things of 
the invisible world. Only a short time 
ago, indeed, I heard a little boy quite 
promptly respond " Glass ! " when he was 
asked, rather idly, the supposedly unan- 
swerable question, what spirits are made 
of. But this feeling with regard to trans- 
parency is, of course, quite inarticulate. 
What the child— the particular child of 
whom alone I can profess to speak with 
even approximate certainty — would have 
said of glass and mica and dragon-fly 
61 



Memoirs of a Child 

wings, was that they were " pretty ; " 
though without doubt she would have 
dimly felt that the word did not sum up 
their full charm. 

Bits of coloured glass with which one 
might change the whole face of nature 
were greatly esteemed ; and prisms, broken 
or whole, even more. These last were not 
only beautiful in themselves, but magic 
almost in their power to make rainbows. 

Upon the whole, glass-topped boxes were 
among the most desirable species of " port- 
able property." Boxes, in themselves, ap- 
pealed to her strongly: not only boxes 
with ribbon hinges, and handkerchief boxes 
with lovely ladies on them richly touched 
up with gilding, but even boxes that were 
just boxes (to the uninitiated) — like the 
famous primrose by the river's brim. But 
when the fascination of transparency was 
added, when one might see into a box 
with the top shut, and see things shut up 
62 



Portable Property 

in it just as if the box were open, then 
there was a concatenation of delights which 
made it indeed a treasure. The beloved 
turtle, as I have said, was in a glazed box, 
and was made more precious thereby. To 
see it so clearly, so close at hand, and not 
to be able to touch it, invested it with an 
indescribable charm. 

Fragments of mica were highly prized 
for the beauty and transparency of the 
sheets into which they might be split, and 
for the pleasure of splitting. Quartz peb- 
bles were eagerly sought, and were held 
very precious ; " rocks with fire in them " 
they were to the child — marvels of nature. 
Hardly less curious and valuable were the 
transparent locust-casts, complete even to 
the eyes, which one would sometimes find 
clinging with lifelike tenacity to a tree 
trunk — and would appropriate with really 
thrilling emotion. 

The first chinquapins of the season 
63 



Memoirs of a Child 

would come in just at the time of the 
child's birthday ; and a long, lustrous, rich- 
brown string of them would be one of 
the delights of the day. The child would 
wind them about her neck and arms, and 
exult over their beauty with all the enjoy- 
ment of an Indian papoose in her beads, 
and with something of the same naive 
pleasure, no doubt, in the consciousness 
of personal adornment — which hardly 
merited, I think, the name of vanity. 

One would as reluctantly apply so harsh 
a term to the joy afforded her by a certain 
little straw hat with a wreath of pink roses 
around it, a joy which forever endeared it 
to recollection. One recalls, indeed, no 
sense of personal relationship toward it 
other than that of rapturous ownership in 
a thing so beautiful, so subtly expressive 
of the whole spirit of spring. 

And then there was a pair of wings 
which testified to the fact that the child 
64 



Portable Property 

had once been an angel. Perhaps she 
was, at the time of her appearance in this 
rdle, of a youth too extreme to appreciate 
the importance of the occasion, and the 
honour of a cherubic part in it. At any 
rate, it seems to have made singularly 
small impression upon her, for it is now 
utterly erased from memory. But the 
diaphanous wings which she wore re- 
mained to her as a rich and enduring 
legacy, and were, I think, the most pre- 
cious of all her possessions. 



65 



Memoirs of a Child 



8. Pomps and Vanities 

ONCE the child had a long- handled 
paper fan which caused her really 
immoderate pride. Why she so 
plumed herself upon this particular fan 
does not now appear. Possibly it seemed to 
her exceptionally beautiful. Probably she 
had never had a fan before "to have, to 
have, to never give back," and its bestowal 
upon her was to her a sort of investiture, 
symbolic of increasing age and dignity. 
At any rate, her head was quite turned by 
its acquisition, and she grew at once rest- 
less for opportunities of display. It struck 
her as a most happy and opportune thing 
that just then a kind of family reunion 
was proposed. The child urged it warmly ; 
for it would bring together all the children 
66 



Pomps and Vanities 

of the connection, and they would see her 
fan! 

The child, as I have said, did not actually 
remember being an angel; but there were 
the wings to prove that she had been one. 
It was a very nice thing, she thought, to 
have been an angel. And she had also 
other sources of pride; as, for example, 
in certain facts of the family history. Two 
circumstances, I remember, especially min- 
istered to vainglory. One was that a near 
relative of hers was mayor of a small 
town; which, to the child's mind, was a 
dizzy height of greatness. The other 
was a really grewsome happening of her 
mother's youth: her discovering, under a 
bed, a would-be robber, who dropped in his 
flight a " great, long, awful knife " which 
proclaimed him to be a potential assassin 
as well. It was no slight thing, of course, 
to be able to assert a sort of proprietary 
interest in such an adventure as this. 
67 



Memoirs of a Child 

The child was also rather proud of the 
fact that she was not particularly strong. 
To be sick always gave one a pleasant 
feeling of consequence ; and to be spoken 
of as " delicate" was almost as flattering 
to one's vanity as to be taken for eight 
years old, say, when one was only six 
going on seven. Almost, but not quite. 
For age, after all, was the real touchstone 
of importance; the real basis of social 
classification. 

It was only, of course, in the way of 
condescension and patronage that a "big 
girl " could associate with her inferiors of 
the child's circle; and the child and her 
friends were, in turn, debarred by self- 
respect from mingling upon equal terms 
with those much younger, or those who 
were in a lower reading-book ; which 
was practically the same thing. For age- 
standing was not wholly a matter of 
chronology. 

68 



Pomps and Vanities 

There was, for instance, a little girl 
whom the child knew, who went to school 
at home, and was not in any regular 
reader. And she had astonishingly preco- 
cious ways and precocious ideas; such as 
that it was n't " anything " to have a sweet- 
heart. Clearly this little girl was practi- 
cally very, very old ; years older than those 
whom chronological records would make 
her contemporaries. 

The child's admiration for this little girl 
was intense and fervid, not only on account 
of the glamour of age and fearful experi- 
ence with which she had managed to in- 
vest herself, but also for a way she had of 
walking on the sides of her shoes, so as to 
produce a most fascinating twist in the 
heels. The child was not naturally imita- 
tive, but she tried faithfully for a while, I 
remember, to acquire this accomplishment, 
considering that it imparted to the carriage 
a peculiar dash and elegance. But, appar- 
69 



Memoirs of a Child 

ently, only very superior persons could walk 
that way with ease and comfort, and she 
gradually abandoned, as too difficult, emu- 
lation even in the one point in which 
emulation seemed possible. 



70 



Social Divertisements 



9. Of Social Divertisements 

THE child, as I have said, was quite 
sure that she was a spitfire, but 
fortunately this character did not 
manifest itself under ordinary circum- 
stances, and she and the little girls of her 
circle played together as a rule peacefully 
enough. There were, however, of course, 
from time to time differences of opinion 
among them which led to discussions more 
or less warm ; for example, the question 
whether delicious or deluscious were the 
more correct and elegant expression was 
provocative of something like personal 
feeling; and a memorable controversy re- 
sulted from divergent views as to the 
merits or demerits of the flavour imparted 
by pigpens to the surrounding atmosphere. 
The really indignant astonishment of one 
71 



Memoirs of a Child 

of the little girls at the perversity which 
could lead one to regard it as other than 
an agreeable fragrance seemed almost to 
remove the dispute from the realm of taste 
to the realm of morals. The child took no 
conspicuous part in either of these historic 
debates, she being probably of doubtful and 
divided mind. 

The conversations in her circle, I think, 
were rarely languid and perfunctory. Con- 
versation, indeed, was one of the chief of 
social pleasures ; especially when there was 
contributing charm of circumstance and 
surrounding ; as when, for instance, it was 
conducted from the tops of opposite gate- 
posts, or in the green heart of a tree. 
Much of it was audible day-dreaming, 
alternate soliloquising, introduced by the 
formula, When I am rich, or, When I am 
married — which were practically synony- 
mous expressions. For all the little girls 
meant to be married some day, and to 
72 



Social Divertisements 

marry fabulous wealth of course. Indeed 
it was a sort of game to pick out one's 
wedding-dress. The child's, I regret to 
say, was to be green satin trimmed pro- 
fusely with tiny gold bells. To this she 
clung as her final and unalterable choice. 

Imagination, it seemed to her, could go 
no further in the creation of the beautiful. 
And so this, I remember, was the costume 
chosen by her for another important occa- 
sion. Somehow she and two or three of 
her friends in town, perhaps at some time 
of house -cleaning, got temporary posses- 
sion of an out-of-the-way room with a 
high bedstead in it from which the slats 
had been removed, and whose great feather 
bed had been let down upon the floor, and 
so left. The child and a friend climbed 
upon the headboard, and two others upon 
the footboard, and each in turn would 
make impressive proclamation, " I have 
got on so-and-so " — minutely describing 
73 



Memoirs of a Child 

some most dazzling and beautiful costume. 
They would then, with the careful grace 
and dignity befitting their magnificence of 
attire, jump off, plunging into the billowy 
softness of the feather bed beneath ; which 
for the time was the sea. Before each 
plunge there was a change to a new and 
if possible yet more gorgeous gown ; 
though, in the child's case, the trailing 
green satin adorned with fairy golden 
bells, which was her first choice, gave a 
serene consciousness of being well-dressed 
not to be improved upon. 

Airs and graces, I may say in passing, 
were appropriate under these circumstances, 
as always when one " played lady," but, 
as a general thing, " putting on " was a 
social crime not to be condoned. It would 
have been considered "putting on/' I 
think, to have said ragged instead of the 
old, established raggety ; to have called 
Hi-spy I -spy, or, in counting out for a 
74 



Social Divertisements 

game, to have said so-and-so was //, in- 
stead of Hit — as everybody else did. 

The child and her friends played, of 
course, all the immemorial games of child- 
hood, and knew, without apparently ever 
learning them, all requisite rules and rhymes 
— some of which latter exercised over the 
child's mind the genuine poetic spell. When 
one went 'round and 'round, for example, 
singing, 

"Green gravels, green gravels, your true love is 
dead; 
He sent you a letter to turn back your head ! " 

a vague exquisite sadness seemed to diffuse 
itself around, and one's voice quite naturally 
took on a touching plaintiveness. A dead 
true love seemed to the child a most roman- 
tic and delightful thing ; though she would 
have resented bitterly the imputation of a 
concrete and actual " sweetheart." 
And then there was a certain counting- 
75 



Memoirs of a Child 

out rhyme which appealed particularly to 
her imagination ; a rhyme beginning with 
some rather melodious nonsense words, 
now, alas, obliterated from memory, and 
ending deliciously, — 

" One flew east, and one flew west ; 
One flew over the curlew's nest. 

What flew east and what flew west, she 
never had, I think, the slightest idea. But 
she felt no need of explicitness. It was 
enough to see in vision the darting of swift, 
shadowy wings across a great, beautiful, 
sunset sky. 

" King William was King George's Son " 
was a game whose charm lay largely in the 
chant which went with it ; which, by the 
way, one cannot help thinking was the rather 
obscure tribute of some small, inglorious 
laureate to the Queen's marriage. It is 
perhaps unnecessary to say that the verses 
in full run as follows, — 
76 



Social Divertisements 

" King William was King George's son, 
And all the royal race he run : 
Upon his breast he wore a star, 
And it was called the Star of War. 

" Choose the east and choose the west, 
Choose the one that you love best. 

" Upon this carpet you shall kneel, 
Sure as the grass grows in the field. — 
Salute your bride and kiss her sweet, 
And rise again upon your feet." 

This hypothesis, at any rate, supplies 
a sort of link between the verses, which 
to the child's mind seemed to present a 
curiously abrupt and total change of sub- 
ject. This and the trifling grammatical 
license in the second line (according to its 
usual reading) she recognised as blemishes. 
She would have preferred, too, that there 
should have been more about what she 
pictured to herself as an exciting sporting 
event, instead of the comparatively tame 
conclusion. For the royal racer at full 
77 



Memoirs of a Child 

speed, adorned with his glittering Star of 
War, was a mental concept equally vivid 
and attractive. That alone was enough to 
offset any small defects, and to make this a 
decided favourite among " poetic" games. 

Sometimes mere romping games were 
better still ; such as Tag, and Catcher, and 
Prisoner's base, and Puss in the Corner; 
Blindman's Buff, and Dog on Wood, and 
Fox in the Warner All Come Over. — 
What the Warner is, or was, I confess I do 
not yet know. The obscurity of the ex- 
pression, indeed, caused variants to mul- 
tiply ; among which were Fox in the Water, 
and Fox in the Walnut. None of these, 
however, notwithstanding their specious 
appearance of clarity, were quite convincing, 
and The Warner remained the really stand- 
ard and accepted term. 

The keenest fun of all, perhaps, was in 
games which were essentially practical jokes 
upon the uninitiated ; one of the favourite 
7$ 



Social Divertisements 

of which was, in substance, the preparation 
of an apparently luxurious, but practically 
bottomless seat, and the ceremonious assign- 
ment of it to some unsuspecting and rather 
flattered individual, the measure of whose 
ensuing chagrin determined the success of 
the game. For the child and her friends, 
it is needless to say, were as yet in the 
Dark Ages of humour and of mercy. 

Sometimes just running was pleasure 
enough ; particularly running up and down 
hill and running before a high wind, with 
one's skirts held outspread like a sail. 

Then there were the things which one 
did fervidly and delightedly each in its own 
mysteriously ordained season, and never, by 
any chance, in any other; such as hoop 
rolling, rubber-ball bouncing, and jumping- 
rope. There were also, of course, " parlour 
games " innumerable and of every grade of 
merit. None, however, approached the in- 
credible depth of stupidity which seemed 
79 



Memoirs of a Child 

to mark a game, or so-called game, which 
two of the child's grown-up cousins in the 
country used to play, off by themselves 
under one of the shady trees. So far as 
she could see, it consisted in sitting motion- 
less for hours, staring down at the little 
table between them, and never saying a 
word. But she never went very near them, 
and there might, of course, have been other 
details. 



80 



Conduct 



10. Conduct and Kindred 
Matters 

THERE was a distinct tendency in the 
child and her friends toward casu- 
istical discussion ; a tendency which 
accounted in part, no doubt, for the nicety 
and precision of the ethical code which was 
recognised among them. For instance, to 
say " I wish I had it " of anything some one 
else had, was coveting. One must be very 
careful to say, " I wish I had one like it." 
And in like manner, other things, which to 
the superficial view seemed comparatively 
innocent, were held to be " the same as " 
quite heinous and deadly sins. 

There was one little girl, in particular, 
whom one remembers as upholding an ex- 
alted moral standard. This little girl had 
a way of intoning the dreadful words, 
6 81 



Memoirs of a Child 

" O-O-O, y-o-u've t-o-l-d a S-t-O-R-y ! " 
so as to strike a chill to the very marrow, 
not only of the offender, but even of the 
innocent bystander. 

It was only as an innocent bystander, I 
am glad to say, that the child ever shivered 
under such a deliverance. And yet once 
the child told a story ; a story of the unmit- 
igated kind known to the coloured popula- 
tion as " pine black." * It happened in this 
wise : The child, then, I imagine, of very 
tender years, went to a party ; and in some 
now forgotten way the terrible catastrophe 
befell her of having a little boy detailed to 
escort her home; or perhaps it was the 
little boy's own unconscious cruelty. How 
it came about mattered not at all to her. 
She did not, so far as I know, particularly 
blame the little boy, or look upon him 
otherwise than as a mere instrument of 
fate. I think, indeed, she concealed her 

1 Point blank. 

82 



Conduct 

anguish from him, and parted from him 
at the gate with a polite good-bye ; though 
her heart was heavy within her at the 
thought of what awaited her at the hands 
of a cruel world. 

When she went in, however, where 
" everybody " was, she was greeted by the 
question, " Why, how did you get home ? 
Did Mr. X bring you ? " (Mr. X was the 
husband of the lady who had given the 
party.) Instantly the thought flashed into 
her mind that nobody knew, and nobody 
would ever know if she only said Yes. It 
was very easy to say just Yes. So the 
child said " Yes," — said it as if she had 
been telling stories all her life. It was 
wonderfully easy. And nothing whatever 
happened to her ; she did not even have to 
tell another " lie," as her reader would have 
called it, to support the first. Even the 
subsequent pangs of conscience were com- 
paratively light. But any other course, she 
83 



Memoirs of a Child 

knew, would have brought upon her the 
calamity of having the little boy assigned to 
her as a sweetheart ; and mortal peril, as she 
instinctively apprehended, excuses much. 

Still, it was not a pleasant thing to think 
about afterwards. And this was not the 
only deplorable episode brought about by 
her stringent ideas of propriety, and her 
aversion to being teased. Which tragedy 
came first, it is now impossible to say ; but 
in this last-mentioned case, I know, the 
child was very small indeed, — too small 
to go anywhere alone ; for upon that fact 
the occurrence hinged. 

For some reason, one Sunday, there was 
no member of the family to take her to 
Sunday School; and so the obvious plan 
suggested itself of sending her in the care 
of a boy who lived in the house with her, 
and whose own Sunday School lay some- 
what in the same direction. He was a 
boy considerably older than the child, and 
84 



Conduct 

a very good friend of hers, in an elder- 
brotherly sort of way. It was he, indeed, 
who had bestowed upon her the blue glass 
ring which was one of her chief treasures. 
But a public appearance with him was 
another matter, — a thing to excite remark, 
notwithstanding his comparatively vener- 
able age, and his footing of family friend. 
So, flatly and stubbornly, the child refused 
to go with him, — unaccountably refused, 
as it seemed to her elders. Certainly it 
seemed a case of pure obstinacy, of wanton 
rebellion against rightful authority ; which 
finally asserted itself by resort to a mild 
equivalent of Solomon's rod. Then the 
child suffered a veil to be tied over her 
tear-stained countenance, and set out with 
the boy; who as they went along enter- 
tained her with a flow of light and agreeable 
small talk; politely ignoring all preceding 
incidents and such remaining symptoms of 
discomposure upon her part as a tendency 
85 



Memoirs of a Child 

to chew her veil, and to breathe in an 
irregular and convulsive manner. 

The child did not think she deserved to 
be punished that time ; and yet the punish- 
ment left behind it no bitterness. Perhaps 
she was sustained by the thought that she 
was no ordinary culprit, but was, in a way, 
a martyr to principle. Perhaps she was 
aware, in some inarticulate manner, that 
even if her punishment had been a mistake 
there had been no wrath, caprice, nor will- 
ing injustice in its infliction. Chiefly, how- 
ever, without doubt, it was that there is a 
profound repose and satisfaction which 
follows " as the day the night " submission 
to " awful rule and right authority." 

One remembers only one other instance 
of like punishment — of any punishment, 
indeed — in all childhood. The child had 
been " fractious," I think, for some little 
time ; had been in that state of mind which 
her nurse would have graphically described 
86 



Conduct 

as "spilin' for a whippin' ;" and at last 
she was overtaken by the visitation of jus- 
tice. What her specific misdeed was, I 
cannot now recall. All is to the last de- 
gree hazy, except the finale of Sabbath 
calm, of unutterable content, of love for 
all mankind. The child had had in her 
pocket a slate pencil of exceptional value ; 
a slate pencil covered for half its length 
with red and blue plaid paper. This, dur- 
ing the few stormy moments preceding, 
had been accidentally broken; but even 
this disturbed not at all her delicious sense 
of peace, her exquisite beatitude of spirit. 

She had been bad, but that was atoned 
for, and now she was good. The sense of 
being good never, I think, so flooded her 
consciousness and thrilled her with pleas- 
ure as just then. I can recall, indeed, no 
other marked instance of feeling "good; " 
nothing more than an occasional rather 
comfortable feeling of beneficence result - 
S7 



Memoirs of a Child 

ing from some trifling act of kindness, or 
fancied kindness, and the passing glow- 
attending some childish magnanimity, such 
as now and again marked the intercourse 
of the little group to which she belonged. 
A more or less vague sensation of wicked- 
ness, on the other hand, as 1 have already 
intimated, was apt to be a concomitant of 
any mood of sombreness whatever, as of 
awe, or home-sickness. This was wholly 
independent of outside suggestion, and even, 
I think, of the child's antecedent conduct. 
Perhaps the effect upon the conscience of 
any depressing influence was, in a measure, 
reflex and fortuitous. When one had been 
bad one felt rather miserable; and con- 
versely, when one felt rather miserable one 
was apt to feel " bad." And yet I cannot 
feel that this accounts entirely for this 
haunting undefined compunction, which was, 
as it were, a formless shadow rising from 
dim depths beneath conduct — from the 
88 



Conduct 

elemental, the essential. There was, at all 
times, I think, a subconscious intuition of 
something subtly amiss in her own nature ; 
an intuition ever ready to rise into con- 
sciousness when her thoughts from any 
cause should be thrown back upon self. 



89 



Memoirs of a Child 



11. Dreams and Reveries 

CASTLE-BUILDING, as I have said, 
was a favourite occupation of the 
child and her friends; but it was 
castle-building distinctly limited in scope 
and variety, consisting almost wholly of 
splendid plans for the time " when I am 
rich," or "when I am married;" which, 
I repeat, were perfectly interchangeable 
expressions. Generally these discussions 
narrowed down to rather minute details 
regarding one's gorgeous future establish- 
ment and one's prospective gowns. The 
child's boudoir, for example (she thought 
it very fine to call it a boudoir), was quite 
clear in her mind. Rather a coolness, in 
fact, arose between herself and one of her 
friends because of the latter's unaccountable 
90 



Dreams and Reveries 

lack of appreciation of the colour scheme 
which she had selected. 

Alone, her dreams took a wider range, 
and concerned themselves not only with the 
future, but with the present and the past, 
building upon the actual a superstructure 
of make-believe. But fact and fancy re- 
mained, as a rule, distinct enough in her 
mind to be in no way confounded. Once, 
however, the child found herself embarked 
upon a minute account of a wholly fictitious 
experience — an alleged visit to a certain 
beautiful house which was her ideal of 
what a house should be, and as such 
very familiar to her dreams; found her- 
self, quite gratuitously, "telling a story," 
and checked herself, inexpressibly shocked 
at her own wanton and inexplicable wicked- 
ness — the recollection of which continued 
to be an enduring source of self- distrust. 

One of the clearest of all recollections is 
of a day-dream, if one may call that a 
91 



Memoirs of a Child 

day-dream which happened to come at 
night. It was the night of a Christmas 
eve, and the child was lying wide-awake, 
in a state of delicious excitement, think- 
ing with all her might about Christmas 
presents. There were delightful certainties 
to look forward to; and for awhile she 
revelled in anticipations of what the morn- 
ing was sure to bring her. But one's mind, 
when it is particularly active, cannot rest in 
certainties ; and she began to consider pos- 
sibilities. What a fine thing it would be if 
somebody she had not thought of at all, 
somebody who never had given her any- 
thing, should send her a lovely present! 

It was a fascinating idea, which grad- 
ually assumed more and more of concrete - 

ness. Suppose Miss should send her 

something ! Miss might conceivably 

do any sweet and pleasant thing. Why 

might she not send the child a Christmas 

present? There was no reason in the 

92 



Dreams and Reveries 

world why she might not, but many rea- 
sons why she might. One, however, was 
not relying on reasons. One had a strong 
and growing presentiment that she would 
send ; that she had sent ; that she had sent 
something beautiful, which one would get 
in the morning ; that she had sent it in a 
basket, by a boy, — by a boy named John 
Johns. The child had never heard of any 
boy named John Johns; and that made 
her all the surer that it was a real, sure- 
'nough presentiment. 

The next morning is indistinguishable 
from any other Christmas morning ; which 
indicates perhaps that nothing unusual 
happened. 

A halo of dreams was a veritable part of 
her life. Almost as real as any other of her 
childish possessions remains a little floating 
car which she constructed for herself in 
imagination ; a little car rather like a glori- 
fied two-seated bread -tray, pictured always 
93 



Memoirs of a Child 

as gliding upstairs high in mid-air, or sus- 
pended after the manner of Mohammed's 
coffin. The irksomeness of stair-climbing 
during some passing fit of languor or weak- 
ness probably suggested the car, and the 
idea was too delightfully redolent of fairy- 
land ever to be abandoned. 

So too, to dispel the tedium of church, 
it was a well-established habit of the child's 
to take mental possession of the bonnets of 
the congregation, and to occupy herself in 
fitting them upon her dolt — after reducing 
them to an appropriate and fascinating 
smallness. Her doll was, of course, at 
home, decorously put away for Sunday; 
but it never, I think, at any other time, 
gave her pleasure quite so keen and en- 
grossing. It was also a pleasure when the 
plate was passed, to deposit upon it, men- 
tally, a million-dollar note; for there was 
nothing paltry and circumscribed about 
these ideal transactions. 
94 



Dreams and Reveries 

The clouds, as I have mentioned, were a 
part of her domain, lordly pleasure-grounds 
to which she often transported herself in 
fancy, with a vividness of realisation which 
brought with it something of the deep re- 
freshing of an actual and delectable change 
of air and scene. One morning, in par- 
ticular, I remember, she was sitting out on 
the porch steps which led into the flowery 
side -yard of her home, and gazing up into 
the sky, which was full of soft, white, 
piled-up clouds — when the thought came 
that that day was a holiday, and with it 
the swift and joyous determination to 
spend it watching the clouds, and imagin- 
ing herself among them, resting upon their 
softness, climbing their snowy summits, 
and revelling in their loveliness. 

Rather dimly I remember Space and Time 
as subjects of fascinating, bewildering, al- 
most self-torturing reverie, reverie which 
lost one, as it were, in a void infinity. I 
95 



Memoirs of a Child 

remember also the curiously similar frame 
of mind induced by repeating a word, any 
word, until it became meaningless ; until it 
was blotted out by a mere indescribable 
weirdness. All who have read Tennyson's 
Life, by his son, must recall the remarkable 
description, in the poet's own words, of the 
trancelike state into which, from boyhood 
up, he would pass upon silently repeating 
his own name three or four times. And 
elsewhere he says : 

u More than once when I 
Sat all alone, revolving in myself 
The word that is the symbol of myself, 
The mortal limit of the self was loosed 
And passed into the nameless, as a cloud 
Melts into Heaven." 

But, as I have said, the child's name had 
nothing to do with what I cannot help 
thinking a cognate state, and was never 
in any instance, so far as I can recall, the 
word experimented with. Any common 
96 



Dreams and Reveries 

every-day word whatever, said over and 
over to one's self, when one was quite 
alone, would suddenly become strange, un- 
real ; and for a flash of time the solid earth 
would seem to be melting from under one's 
feet. There was, however, none of the 
rapture and exaltation of the poet's far 
more vivid experience. He, as it will be 
remembered, says : 

" Out of the intensity of the conscious- 
ness of individuality, the individuality itself 
seemed to dissolve and fade away into 
boundless being, and this not a confused 
state, but the clearest of the clearest, the 
surest of the surest, the weirdest of the 
weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death 
was an almost laughable impossibility, the 
loss of personality (if so it were) seeming 
no extinction but the only true life. . . . 
This might be the state which St. Paul 
describes, ' Whether in the body I cannot 
tell, or whether out of the body I cannot 
7 97 



Memoirs of a Child 

tell.' ... I am ashamed of my feeble 
description. Have I not said the state is 
utterly beyond words ? But in a moment, 
when I come back to my normal state of 
' sanity,' I am ready to fight for mein liebes 
Ich, and hold that it will last for aeons of 
aeons." 

With the child, there was only a swift 
sense of vacuity, of loss of hold upon the 
actual, carrying with it a not unpleasing 
touch of horror ; a sensation only worthy 
of mention in this connection for the sim- 
ilarity, and the difference, of the mode 
of causation. 



98 



Bugbears 



12. Bugbears 

THE child, when she came to the age 
of composition- writing, always be- 
gan a disquisition by saying, " There 
are many kinds of — " whatever it was 
that was under consideration. All the 
varieties which one could painfully muster 

— which seemed suddenly to have dwindled 
to an extreme fewness — were then enu- 
merated with as much verbiage as possible, 
and in a large and straggling hand. This 
would usually bring one quite in sight of 
the desired haven, the end. 

But aside from the exigencies of com- 
position, I may say that with the child 
there were many kinds of bugbears ; many 
things, that is, which, in the language of 
the dictionary, excited " needless terror " 

— or needless horror, I venture to add, to 

99 
LofC. 



Memoirs of a Child 

make the word inclusive enough for all 
the child's especial betes noires. 

First of all, there were the dog-catchers. 
One of the most terrible sights of those 
early years was that of a great cage lum- 
bering through the street, a crowd of hap- 
less dogs gazing out through the wires 
with innocent unconcern. It represented 
to her mind fiendish cruelty. It was also 
a reminder of the existence of a class of 
persons whose business in life was " catch- 
ing" people and things — a fact of which 
she was already but too well persuaded. 
The verb " to catch " was indeed in- 
dissolubly associated with the nefarious 
activities of liers-in-wait for erring or 
unfortunate children, and carried with it 
a fearful wealth of suggestion. Precisely 
what it implied in this connection, she 
never determined, nor sought to deter- 
mine; but it is certain that the term lost 
nothing by its vagueness. 
100 



Bugbears 



Her heart quite bled for the hapless 
dogs overtaken by a fate so dreadful. 
But she did not like dogs, even very tiny 
little dogs who would run after one out of 
pure frivolity; as the one did, no doubt, 
which frightened her one day into shriek- 
ing wildly and flying across the street, just 
under the windows of her uncle's house, 
to which she was going. And this uncle, 
kind as he was (it was he who made her 
beautiful box -lanterns), had a fearful pro- 
pensity for joking. But she recovered 
breath, smoothed down her ruffled plu- 
mage, and went upstairs sedately. And 
clearly he had no suspicions; for he ex- 
pressly said, "What was that little col- 
oured girl down there screaming about just 
now ? " which relieved her mind a good 
deal. For above all things she detested 
being laughed at. 

The child, I repeat, was afraid of many 
things, — of everything which could bite or 
101 



Memoirs of a Child 

gore or chase, or hiss at one (geese indeed 
were an especial terror) ; but many of her 
bugbears bore no relation whatever to her 
personal safety. One of the chief of these 
was represented by a mere bent picket in 
an iron railing around a house near her 
home. Tradition had it that a mad bull, 
breaking loose in the street and starting 
upon a fierce onslaught upon society, had 
in its blind fury impaled itself upon this 
spiked fence, — upon that particular spike, 
— and that the rust upon it was blood. 
The child never saw it, I think, without 
becoming limp in her knees; and to this 
day the one who was the child is now and 
again pursued in dreams by an infuriated 
cow, and seeks refuge in some wretched 
little house into which the beast is always 
about to break with perfect ease — when 
waking comes. 

But the terror of wild bulls suggested 
by that fearful spike was a secondary 
102 



Bugbears 

consideration. There was an indescrib- 
able torture in the idea that it had pierced 
living flesh, and that there was blood upon 
it. Once, I remember, the child was all 
alone when something happened to recall 
to her an account she had overheard of 
somebody's having been badly hurt, — who 
or how, I have forgotten, — and suddenly 
a curious, unbearable agony took posses- 
sion of her; and it became mysteriously 
necessary to reach out and hold to some- 
thing; though, I may say in passing, she 
did not faint then, and never but once in 
all her after life. 

Quite a surpassing horror was the actual 
sight of a little dog lying dead in an alley 
with a stream of blood from its mouth. 
The gruesome spectacle seemed to print 
itself on her brain, and to invade every 
scene and circumstance of life; darkening 
all with its own loathliness and pity. This 
was worse than seeing the hairiest and leg- 
103 



Memoirs of a Child 

giest possible worm; though even an or- 
dinary worm was to the child a highly 
shudder-producing object. 

Almost as bad was the spectacle which 
she accidentally encountered one day of a 
headless chicken hopping horribly on the 
ground, — an apparition forever unforgetta- 
ble, forever horrible, utterly irreconcilable, 
for years, with any predilection for chicken 
as an article of diet. 

One almost forgot the bull and the dog 
and the chicken after awhile, however, but 
ghosts were an abiding bugbear, — though 
one knew, of course, that there were no 
such things. There was perhaps no more 
acute suffering in all childhood than from 
this source; and I should like to entreat 
for all children an exemption from the 
" needless terror " awakened by these tales, 
a terror with which the immature reason is 
wholly unable to cope. The over-stimu- 
lated imagination of a child requires no 
104 



Bugbears 

warrant for the bugbears it evokes and for 
a time invests with reality. Not a few of 
the things which the child thought of with 
uneasiness were quite unheard-of and pre- 
posterous, as she would have acknowledged 
with perfect readiness, and with no diminu- 
tion whatever of the discomfort which the 
thought of them produced. But it never 
occurred to her to speak of what I may 
call her fantastic terrors, the chance shapes 
assumed by the formless fear so apt to 
arise in all children when the imagination 
has been markedly excited. 

Once, I remember, she was alone in an 
unused out-of-the-way room in her own 
home, sitting upon the floor, sailing a little 
paper boat in a basin. In the water she 
had put scraps of paper of various shapes 
and sizes to represent sea-monsters. She 
had amused herself absorbingly for a long 
time blowing the boat about and pretend- 
ing that the passengers and crew were 
105 



Memoirs of a Child 

afraid of the whales and sea-serpents, when 
suddenly, without visible reason, it sank. 
All at once it seemed to her that it was 
" coming true" — the sea, the ship, the sea- 
monsters ; that she might be overwhelmed 
then and there by the horror-haunted 
waters; and she fled, panic-stricken. 

Sometimes she shivered on the brink of 
her bath with the thought that it might, 
without warning, turn into a narrow, in- 
finitely deep dependency of the ocean — 
into a bottomless pit of dark water, per- 
fectly accessible to the sea-serpent; which 
occupied no small place in the child's im- 
aginings. Almost as fearful, in a different 
way, was the thought which came to her 
sometimes when she was alone with a 
rocking-chair, that all at once it might be- 
gin to rock — which she felt was really more 
than she could possibly bear. 

Nothing indeed was more unpleasant 
than the thought of any betrayal of fur- 
106 



Bugtx 



ears 

tive life by things that ought to be dead. 
Lead pipes, for instance, occasionally made 
one distinctly uncomfortable — so very little 
would be needed to turn them into snakes ! 
It seems strange to me now that with all 
her horror of transformations, and particu- 
larly of snaky transformations, she should 
have watched with warm sympathy and 
approval the long-continued efforts of two 
of her boy-cousins to raise snakes on a large 
scale by soaking horse-hairs in a barrel of 
water, whose stagnant smell, inextricably 
associated with an awed sense of the occult, 
is an undying memory. But about all 
this, rather occult as it undeniably was, 
there was not, she considered, overwhelm- 
ing mystery; for the change was to be 
brought about by a sort of recipe, almost 
as if one were making a pudding. And 
the snakes were to be every-day snakes, 
like those of the woods and fields, not the 
nameless, shadowy creatures indigenous to 
107 



Memoirs of a Child 

gloom and obscurity, which were the ser- 
pents most unpleasantly intrusive upon the 
imagination, — although one did not believe 
in them, of course. Of real, authentic 
snakes she had no especial fear, though she 
shuddered with physical repulsion at their 
" creepiness ; " so little fear that she, with 
another child, once found wholly delight- 
ful excitement in assisting as spectators at 
a battle royal in the woods between a 
black snake and a moccasin, to which they 
were attracted by the rattle and clatter of 
fiercely threshed leaves, and the sun's 
glitter upon the coiling combatants. 

The child at times, I think, rather in- 
voked these fantastic fears, by saying to 
herself, for the luxury of a slight shudder, 
" s'pose" so-and-so should happen — some- 
thing interestingly uncanny; for a mere 
touch of horror, as everybody knows, is 
agreeable enough. And then the " scary " 
idea she had summoned was not always 
108 



Bugbears 

easily dismissed; but on the contrary re- 
mained, not seldom, to tyrannise over her 
mind quite painfully. Then again these 
disquieting fancies would sometimes come 
upon her without apparent reason, in the 
midst of fascinating make-believe which 
seemed to hold no hint of the weird. And 
one would be constrained forthwith to fly 
the solitude which bred such spectres, and 
seek cheerful human company. 



109 



Memoirs of a Child 



13. Handicraft 

THE child was far from possessing any 
marked degree of manual dexterity, 
but she often made playthings for 
herself which quite fulfilled their purpose 
of ministering to her own personal delec- 
tation. The crudest, perhaps, but by no 
means the least effective of these was what 
she called a " balloon," which was merely 
a triangular piece of tissue paper tied at the 
three corners to strings which met in the 
child's hand. One had but to run in a 
high wind, and it puffed and pulled and 
rose finely. Kites, too, she attempted some- 
times ; upon the whole, with indifferent 
success. But as even "a dead leaf in a 
wind may soar like a bird," their charac- 
teristic inertia was occasionally overcome, 
and they made short swallow-flights which 
110 



Handicraft 

afforded her great pride and pleasure. Bows 
and arrows, she also constructed, and en- 
joyed; getting eminently satisfactory re- 
sults from such simple raw material as a 
piece of barrel-hoop, a string, and an um- 
brella rib. 

Of course, she made larkspur rings, and 
rings of the tiny purple blooms of sheep - 
mint, bur baskets and leaf baskets, " hop- 
pergrass carriages" of the long, pliable 
stems of the narrow-leaf plantain inter- 
woven upon her fingers, thistle-bloom um- 
brellas, chains of dandelion stalks and clover 
blossoms, and manipulated paper so as 
to evolve caps and boats and boxes and 
chickens and windmills and snappers and 
other delightful things. 

Paper dolls she also made ; but one could 
buy much prettier ones. So, as a general 
thing, she bought her dolls, and contented 
herself with fabricating for them elaborate 
wardrobes, and suits of household furniture 
111 



Memoirs of a Child 

consisting of chairs, tables, and beds, capable 
of standing alone in a shaky and uncertain 
manner. 

The joy of making never came to her so 
strongly as in the creation of the beautiful ; 
as when, for instance, she cut small, stout 
ladies from a lump of fuller's earth, and 
coloured them in rainbow tints — or, rather, 
tints as prismatic as could be yielded by a 
paint-box reduced to something of muddy 
uniformity by the child's habit of effecting 
any desired combination of colours by dab- 
bling a wet brush first on one cake and 
then on the other. 

The interest of making these artless fig- 
urines was undoubtedly increased by the 
circumstance that at any moment there 
might come sudden disintegration to the 
substance in which she wrought ; or, at 
least, a disastrous splitting off of the partic- 
ular member upon which she was engaged. 
To this peculiarity of the medium in which 
112 



Handicraft 

they were developed was due their marked 
solidity of structure, — a peculiarity which 
allied them closely to the traditional Dutch 
type. 

These were not dolls to the child, not 
things to be played with, but works of art, 
objects of vertu, for mere contemplation 
and cherishing ; or, more generally, for 
solemn bestowal upon some favoured friend. 
Of like nature were the little books cut 
out of gypsum which some of her ac- 
quaintances displayed, to the child's admir- 
ing envy. I do not remember that she 
herself ever carved one of these highly 
prized volumes ; not having, I suppose, the 
necessary material. 

There was nothing, perhaps, among the 
multitude of beautiful things at the annual 
Agricultural Fair, which seemed to her quite 
so entrancing as the wax-work. The 
flowers, the fruit, the luncheons (complete 
even to a glass of wine, or a foaming mug 
8 113 



Memoirs of a Child 

of beer) were to her marvels of human 
ingenuity and skill, which she was moved 
to emulate. 

For awhile her small funds were quite 
absorbed in the purchase of the little gaily 
tinted sheets of wax in which there lay 
such enchanting possibilities. One can 
never forget the delight which there was 
in the pure colours, in the smooth, ex- 
quisitely yielding surfaces. I recall, how- 
ever, but dimly any joy of achievement 
in this direction ; though fuchsias, sus- 
ceptible of recognition, she certainly suc- 
ceeded in making. Doubtless she was 
chilled and discouraged by a sense of the 
distance which lay between such modest 
accomplishment and the masterpieces which 
had fired her fancy and aroused her ambi- 
tion. Despairing of reaching this pinnacle, 
— or becoming by some means aware that 
even the most marvellous creations in wax 
were regarded with some indifference by 
114 



Handicraft 

those around her — she gradually aban- 
doned this branch of art. 

Glass-blowing she undertook, after see- 
ing an exhibition of its fairy-like products, 
and, at the cost of repeatedly burned 
fingers, succeeded in, to the extent of 
spinning an occasional thread between 
two halves of a broken medicine-tube, 
held in the flame of the gas. 

Wood -carving she also took up in a 
small way; devoting herself particularly 
to the production of miniature knives, 
forks, and spoons. A set consisting of 
these three pieces seemed to her a very 
chaste and appropriate present for a friend. 
It was, indeed, delicately expressive of a 
willingness to take trouble for the recipient ; 
for the making was not unattended with 
difficulties when one was working with a 
chronically dull knife on wood decidedly 
given to splintering. The fork, in par- 
ticular, was not to be "pronged" without 
115 



Memoirs of a Child 

almost desperate risk. But these uncertain- 
ties, of course, really made the process all 
the more interesting. 

Toward needlework she had no great 
inclination ; though it was pleasant enough, 
sometimes, to sew for one's doll in a circle 
of similarly employed friends, who dis- 
cussed ways and means together, jointly 
confronted difficulties, and admired each 
other's work. Doll's dress-making was not 
exacting. All one had to do was to sew 
together, in a sketchy way, the edges of a 
piece of goods, run a straggling gathering 
string in the top, hem or scallop the 
bottom, cut arm-holes, add a shawl or 
fichu and a sash, and the costume was 
complete. 

There must have been, as a rule, an 
embarrassing scrappiness in the supply of 
material — it happened so often that dresses 
must, of necessity, approach the extreme 
limit of permissible shortness. The most 
116 



Handicraft 

common of all accidents was that they 
should overstep this limit, and be found 
too short to " do." Quite invariably, I 
think, some member of the circle would 
hold up her doll when she tried its dress 
on, and distressfully inquire if the garment 
were not too short. Obviously anything 
but reassurance was out of the question; 
and the child finally hit upon a convenient 
formula for all such occasions. "Not," 
she would say, " with very pretty drawers ! " 
This served perfectly for awhile ; but, one 
day, when she placidly administered this 
consolation, the little girl addressed retorted 
with the manifestly unfair and uncalled-for 
question, " But how do you make very 
pretty drawers ? " a question which seemed 
to the child to reveal a want of tact and 
savoir fake which was really deplorable. 

Once the child was staying with a lady 
who was teaching her children to sew ; and 
the lady gave her, too, a task, — that of 
117 



Memoirs of a Child 

hemming one side of something which 
abides in recollection as a sheet; which it 
may or may not have been. The other 
side was already hemmed, probably by the 
lady herself. 

It was a tedious undertaking to traverse 
by the slow progression of stitches the 
formidable distance between one corner 
and another; but the child stt herself 
doggedly to reach her goal and at last 
reached it. But perhaps she had considered 
her stitches too exclusively as steps toward 
freedom ; perhaps she had unconsciously 
assumed seven-league boots, as it were; 
for when she had finished her hem the 
lady told her to pick it out ! 

It seemed very strange to the child ; for 
she herself could see nothing wrong in the 
work, which she obediently set herself to 
demolish. But, of course, the lady knew 
better than she, and it must be very, very 
bad. Anyhow there was comfort in the 
118 



Handicraft 

thought that there would remain no tan- 
gible evidence of her mortifying failure. 
It was almost with renewed cheerfulness 
that she picked out the very last stitch of 
the long, long hem, and handed back the 
sheet, or whatever it was, to the lady. 
The lady looked at it, and looked at the 
child. " My dear," she said, " you've picked 
out the wrong hem ! " 

Upon the whole, the child had no very 
roseate impression of " plain sewing." 
"Fancy work," however, as represented 
by the adornment of perforated cardboard 
with bright -coloured worsted stitches, was 
different and altogether agreeable. A de- 
lightful neatness and precision of effect 
was attainable without trouble, through the 
guidance of the holes, and one's stitches 
might be as long as one chose ! A simple 
cross-stitch border in red or blue, and an 
affectionate motto to match, down the 
centre, were all that was necessary to turn 
119 



Memoirs of a Child 

a strip of cardboard (preferably silver) into 
an ideal " keepsake." 

It was peculiarly pleasant to make " keep- 
sakes " and things designed as gifts, in that 
one might reasonably look forward to a 
climax of gratitude and applause. But 
really appreciative spirits, as the child 
found, are sadly few. How often one was 
surprised and chilled by a touch of obtusity 
even in one's best friends; by something 
strangely stolid and matter-of-course in 
their reception of things which to one's 
own eyes were yet rare and radiant with 
the glamour of creation! 



120 



School 



14. School, Slightly Con- 
sidered 

SCHOOL bored the child, and she 
early developed a fatal facility for 
more or less complete mental ab- 
straction from its irksome routine ; a fact 
which accounts, I suppose, for the dimness 
of the impression left by this side of her 
life. 

Very clearly, though, may be recalled 
what seems to have been her first writing- 
lesson. The teacher made a row of small 
r's across the top of the child's slate, for 
her to imitate ; and the child applied her- 
self to her task with enthusiasm, and a 
really keen desire to excel. She meant to 
do her very best. She might even, she 
thought, do better than the teacher herself, 
for the child did not altogether admire 
121 



Memoirs of a Child 

the teacher's r's. They were disfigured, 
she considered, by having a sort of little 
horn on top, which was due, no doubt 
to accident. Certainly they would look 
much better if they were neatly squared 
off. So the child laboriously filled her 
slate with r's of a new and improved pat- 
tern, in which the objectionable feature 
was carefully omitted ; and then, very 
happily, — for the result, she felt, fully 
justified her judgment in the matter, — 
she handed up her slate for the applause, 
which, alas, quite failed to follow. 

The first reading-lesson, which related 
to A CAT, also retains its place in mem- 
ory ; or rather the rapture which ensued 
when she had mastered it, and felt that 
now, at last, she could read. This delight 
was wholly undimmed by any conscious- 
ness of limitation in her new power. 

The child had known that she should 
love to read. She had quite made up 
122 



School 

her mind before this, indeed, that she 
would never pass a sign in the street, or 
a scrap of printed paper, without reading 
it, when once she was able. And litera- 
ture, as represented by the stories in her 
reading-books, did not at all disappoint 
her. These stories not only delighted her, 
but were, I think, a potent factor in the 
child's moral development. No product 
of human genius, I am convinced, ever 
made a deeper impression upon her for 
good than the harrowing history of the 
bad little boy who threw stones at an 
unoffending stranger of unprepossessing 
appearance, who turned out to be a long- 
lost uncle coming home with a gold watch 
in his pocket for the bad little boy. The 
bad little boy, of course, forfeited the 
watch, and was forced to " hang his 
head" at the otherwise joyful family re- 
union. To be obliged to hang one's head 
seemed to the child quite the acme of ill— 
123 



Memoirs of a Child 

fortune; none the less, perhaps, that the 
words always called up a vague vision of 
a perfectly detached head dangling at the 
end of a string. 

The moral, expressed or implied, did 
not in the least detract from these tales; 
it rather, I think, added a charm, in that 
one had in reading them a certain glow 
of conscious virtue. For the child knew 
that she never threw stones at anybody, 
or took things that were not hers, or 
played truant, or went swimming on Sun- 
day — which were the ever-besetting sins 
of the reading-book juveniles. 

At the same time, I repeat, these stories 
were, on the whole, of distinct benefit to 
her; as, for instance, the Bad-Little-Boy - 
and-Uncle-with -the -Gold -Watch story (I 
regret that the precise title has escaped 
me) stood for the child as a warning that 
appearances are often delusive; that one's 
sin is very apt indeed to find one out; 
124 



School 

and that highly unpleasant consequences 
may be confidently expected to follow. 

But stated thus baldly, the child, even in 
her first intoxication with print, might have 
turned from these valuable truths. She 
might have rejected unadorned admonition 
with something of the impatience of a little 
girl whom she knew long afterwards. This 
little girl was spelling her way through a 
page of precepts, such as, — 

" Be gen-tie to all. 
Al-ways speak the truth. 
Do not slam the door and make a loud noise a-bout 

the house. 
Do not at the ta-ble eat in a greed-y man-ner like 

a pig." 

Suddenly she shut her book with a wrath- 
ful bang, and the spirit of 76 blazed up in 
her. " This old third reader sha'n't boss 
me ! " she said defiantly. 

This very little girl was keenly alive to 
the power and pathos of the fiction of her 
125 



Memoirs of a Child 

reading-book, and to its moral bearings. 
Conveyed in the form of mildly exciting 
anecdotes of little girls and boys who did 
or did not do those particular things, these 
warnings would have been received with 
the utmost meekness. She would have re- 
joiced at the just fate which overtook 
Greedy George or Heedless Harry; she 
would have thrilled when the virtuous con- 
duct of Truthful Mary caused her mother 
to " drop a tear." There were few things, 
by the way, more affecting to the child's 
imagination than this oft-dropped parental 
tear; which she instinctively pictured to 
herself as single, pear-shaped, and of heroic 
size. 

It was not as reading-lessons that the 
child enjoyed these tales, but as mere pri- 
vately imbibed literature, which involved no 
responsibilities of rendition. To read aloud 
to a critical, or supposedly critical, audience 
was a very different matter. Perhaps the 
126 



School 

most painful memory of school is that of a 
certain reading-lesson which one had to 
stumble on with after a class of "great 
big " girls had come into the room, and 
were sitting around listening to one's piti- 
ful efforts. The word " shut " in partic- 
ular, I remember occasioned frightful 
difficulties, by becoming inextricably mixed 
up with the word " shirt" in the child's 
mind, so that it seemed quite impossible 
to pronounce it any other way. As for its 
meaning, it might have been anything or 
nothing, so far as the child was concerned ; 
since the " great big " girls had come in 
words had quite ceased to have any special 
meaning. Reading under these circum- 
stances was little less than agony. The 
child was so acutely uncomfortable that it 
occurred to her that she had a headache, 
which always made her free to leave school. 
So she paused in her halting rendition of 
" James Wilson, the Truant Boy," or other 
127 



Memoirs of a Child 

improving history, and said to the teacher, 
" I've got a headache." 

The teacher smiled. " Isn't it rather 
sudden ? " she said. This hurt the child a 
good deal ; first, as a most unfounded and 
astonishing imputation ; and secondly, upon 
reflection, as a view of the matter for which 
there was really something to be said. Like 
Paolo and Francesca, the child read no more 
that day. But she could not help wondering 
whether she had had a "sure 'nough" 
headache after all. Anyhow, it seemed to 
her that it was a very cruel world. 

The child, I remember, " got her lessons " 
by swaying and beating her breast, and 
saying the words over to herself in a pierc- 
ing whisper ; afterwards supplementing the 
knowledge thus acquired by judicious guess- 
ing. And in the course of time she found 
herself possessed of a modest capital of 
more or less hazy facts about reigns and 
administrations and wars and inventions ; 
128 



School 

modes and tenses and cases and number ; 
boundaries and capitals and climates and 
productions; and the things one must do 
to get the answers in the back of the 
arithmetic. But the most, I am sure, that 
school ever did for her, then or afterwards, 
was to give her the key to the world of 
books. 



129 



Memoirs of a Child 



15. Books 

THE child knew that she should love 
books ; and she did love them, with 
a naive impartiality. Nothing could 
have been more catholic than her taste. 
There was in print some occult enchant- 
ment not now to be understood. It almost 
seems, on looking back, that she was in- 
capable of being bored by any printed 
thing. Johnson's " Rambler/' I remember, 
she found a well-spring of delight, and 
" Proverbial Philosophy " she revelled in. 
At the same time she was keenly alive to 
the charms of more lurid literature ; such as 
she once caught alluring glimpses of in an 
odd number of a certain " family" story- 
paper, thrown in at the gate upon the 
principle that whoever dipped into its ro- 
mances must obtain the rest at any hazard. 
130 



Books 

The child, alas, never did obtain the rest ; 
albeit her longing for the end of the story 
for awhile quite poisoned her peace. The 
exquisitely beautiful heroine, at some most 
exciting juncture, had just drawn a silver 
dagger— when the account cruelly broke 
off. It was altogether in vain that the child 
petitioned for the complete story as the 
Christmas present which she would prefer 
to all others — Christmas being then at 
hand. Probably this petition led to a pro- 
hibition of this form of fiction ; for this 
seems to have ended, as it had probably 
begun, her acquaintance with it. 

Upon the whole, however, she enjoyed 
a large, and I cannot help thinking, wise 
measure of liberty, and read a strange 
jumble of things, ranging from " Alice in 
Wonderland " to Hannah More ; from fairy 
tales to Fox's " Book of Martyrs ; " from 
the old-fashioned Gems and Annuals and 
Books of Beauty which had accumulated 
131 



Memoirs of a Child 

in the large and rather heterogeneous home 
library, to " Don Quixote " and the " Iliad." 
Occasional verbal no -thoroughfares 
troubled the child very little. Sooner or 
later, one would catch up with the sense 
again, and what difference did it make 
about small details by the way ? Much in- 
deed which the child read must have taken 
quite a personal imprint from the free im- 
pressionism of her method; and effects 
were not seldom produced, I suppose, 
which would have been slightly surprising 
to the author. I remember, for instance, 
that it rather disturbed her that a certain 
boy-character of whom she was disposed 
to think well should have given "sundry" 
pieces of cake to his friends. It seemed 
to argue a certain closeness of disposition 
to have hoarded the cake until it became 
sun-dry before dispensing it. But there 
were no doubt, she reflected, extenuating 
circumstances. 

132 



Books 

One day the mysterious word " 'em " 
kept occurring in a book she was reading. 
Once she ignored it. Twice she ignored 
it. Three times, and more perhaps, she 
mentally eliminated it from the sentence, 
and made what sense she could of the re- 
mainder. But like Banquo's ghost it would 
not down. So she paused and seriously 
considered; and solved the problem tri- 
umphantly by deciding that it must be an 
eccentric way of spelling Me. After this 
she went on comfortably enough. 

Why " Anne of Geierstein " should be 
persistently linked in memory with this 
etymological struggle, it is hard to say ; for 
surely there are no " 'em's " in its stately 
colloquies. And besides, to have thrilled as 
she did with this, the first of the Waverley 
Novels to fall into her hands, the child 
must have measurably vanquished the diffi- 
culties of printed language; so that the 
connection in time cannot be very close. 
133 



Memoirs of a Child 

That of place, however, probably explains 
it. The out-of-the-way stair-step upon 
which she sat to read " Anne of Geierstein," 
and which was ever after redolent of its 
magic, had been, no doubt, the scene of 
her encounter with that redoubtable " 'em ; " 
and in time these memories merged. 

Scott's novels were to her, I need not 
say, thrilling from the first appearance of 
the Two Horsemen to the distant end. 
" Ivanhoe " she loved best of all ; though it 
seemed to her a decided pity that Rebecca 
did not in the end marry Front de Boeuf, 
of whom, for some inexplicable childish 
reason, she heartily approved. 

Cooper, also, added a new joy to child- 
hood ; for the sake of which the one who 
was the child loves him to-day with a cu- 
rious warmth of gratitude which would not 
have his least device of wood -craft flippantly 
discredited. To him, doubtless, was largely 
due her warm espousal of the noble red 
134 



Books 

man's cause. "The White Man's Treat- 
ment of the Indian," was, I remember, the 
subject she chose once for a composition, 
feeling that she could pour out quite a 
lava-flood of burning eloquence; though 
this, as it turned out, was a mistake, and 
one, as usual, strung out reluctant sentences 
with a wistful eye upon the goal. 

" Logan's Lament," which was in her 
reading-book, contributed no little to her 
indignant sense of pale-face turpitude. 
Consummate pathos is represented in mem- 
ory by this, and by certain extracts from 
"Julius Caesar," which was read to her in 
part before she herself was capable of read- 
ing it. The child quite suffered on Caesar's 
account ; but it was a delicious pain, which 
she would not have foregone. 

Her nascent sense of humour was most 
appealed to, perhaps, by the more broadly 
comic situations in Dickens and the rough- 
and-tumble fun of Lever. But she was 
135 



Memoirs of a Child 

only incidentally amused, I think, with any 
story. The plot was the thing, the roman- 
tic interest, the clearing up of difficulties, 
the outburst of happiness at the end. It 
was Dickens' generous meting out of poetic 
justice, the glow left in one's heart by his 
deliciously happy endings, more even than 
the fact that he made her laugh consumedly, 
which especially endeared him to the child, 
and made her fix upon him as her " favour- 
ite author." 

" The Lady of the Lake " was with equal 
defmiteness chosen as her favourite poem. 
Later, however, " The Ancient Mariner " 
displaced it in her affection. This poem 
had for her a fascination which she never 
attempted to explain. 

Comparatively soon after she made the 
acquaintance of A CAT she seems to have 
launched out upon the great sea of literature 
with an artless confidence and a fine scorn 
of limitations ; though there must have 
136 



Books 

been some interval of confinement to the 
shallow waters of juvenile books. In ret- 
rospect, however, one can see no well- 
marked stages; childish things and things 
unchildish seem inextricably mingled. The 
child, I think, must have accepted without 
prejudice the goods the gods provided in 
the way of books, very much in the order 
in which they came in her way. Nothing, 
I know, ever eclipsed the perennial charm 
of a beloved volume of fairy tales well 
named " The Child's Own Book." This 
was read until it was reduced to a condi- 
tion analogous to that of " The One Hoss 
Shay ; " read with avidity throughout child- 
hood, and ever afterwards recalled with 
tenderness. 

It was a thick book, so thick as to be 
nearly cubical, and had in it, as it seems 
to me, almost every fairy tale that ever 
was written, appropriately illustrated with 
sketchy thumb-nail pictures of slim, short- 
137 



Memoirs of a Child 

waisted princesses with veils out-blown like 
slender rainbows, and of fairy princes with 
no trousers to speak of and stupendous 
plumes in their caps — all in attitudes of 
preternatural grace. The pictures were 
almost as enchanting as the stories — more 
one could hardly say. Inspired by them, 
the child spent many a blissful hour draw- 
ing upon her slate similar radiant beings, 
and similar tables gorgeously set forth with 
" viands." It was especially interesting to 
draw the banquets. This, being wholly 
unhampered by perspective, she did with 
great minuteness of detail. 

A beautiful illustrated edition of " Rey- 
nard the Fox " was among the home books, 
and was one of the most beloved of all. The 
biting, old-world satire of it, of course, was 
not for the child. She enjoyed it simply 
as a brisk and amusing narrative, or series 
of narratives rather, of the yEsop order, 
couched in pleasing verse and enriched by 
138 



Books 

most charming pictures. Another rather 
favourite book was memorable for its pic- 
tures only. This was the "Tour of Dr. 
Syntax in Search of the Picturesque ; " a 
copy of which quaint old work, with its 
brightly coloured plates, was in the fine 
library of the country house at which the 
child oftenest stayed. 

The books belonging to places where one 
visited were, however, as a rule, more of 
a tantalisation than a pleasure; for the 
claims of society persistently interfered with 
their enjoyment. Sometimes the child 
would go out to spend the night, or a 
day or two, with some small cousins of 
hers who lived near town. There was in 
their room a copy of "Telemachus" — that 
enthralling romance — which excited in the 
child a really painful longing. One might, 
it is true, take hurried peeps into it ever 
and anon in the intervals of play ; but the 
troubled rapture of those moments hardly 
139 



Memoirs of a Child 

made up for the wrench of tearing one's 
self away, always when something seemed 
just about to happen. Of course the child 
would have been more than welcome to 
take this book home, but it never occurred 
to her that it was possible, or to anybody 
else that she would care for it. " Don 
Quixote," into which she had made a 
frantic dip, was, I know, most kindly 
pressed upon her from this library, and was 
carried off by her with the warmest glow 
of gratitude. 

With equal pleasure she once carried 
home "Tom Jones" from a semi-public 
library to which she had access. She 
noticed, I remember, that the librarian 
looked after her rather thoughtfully as 
she went off affectionately clasping her 
prize, and she wondered a little what it 
meant. Contrary to her expectation, for 
it had a very interesting look, she did not 
like " Tom Jones " at all, and promptly re- 
140 



Books 

turned it, quite of her own volition, though 
one knows now, of course, that it would in 
any case have been prohibited ; as Gil Bias 
was, to her profound and abiding regret, 
in the midst of her keen enjoyment of it. 
But, as a rule, I repeat, she read what came 
to her hand ; and, surrounded as it was 
her great good fortune to be by sound and 
wholesome literature, took, so far as I 
know, no hurt therefrom. 

The child's encounter with Poe's " Narra- 
tive of A. Gordon Pym " was, I think, the 
only real misadventure which befell her in 
the world of letters. Once begun, it was 
impossible not to go on with it ; though to 
go on was an agony which made the child 
physically ill. And when one was through 
with reading it, one had to think it, sick- 
ening and shuddering under what seemed 
its unbearable horror. 

But there was, as I have said, upon the 
whole, an inseparable connection in the 
141 



Memoirs of a Child 

child's mind between print and pleasure. 
Enjoying so indiscriminately, she must 
have enjoyed the best crudely and imper- 
fectly enough. But she did feel, in a way, 
the thrill of greatness and was, I believe, 
the better for it. 



142 



Language 



16. Language 

I CAN recall but one instance in which 
the child in reading was particularly 
troubled by inability to understand the 
meaning of language. This time, the in- 
ability was total and complete. There 
was no foothold for progress into the 
intent of the printed pages, and of the 
striking illustrations with which they were 
interspersed. It was a yellowed copy of 
Victor Hugo's " Orientales," which she 
found in the library at home, that so 
baffled and tantalised her; tantalised her 
into a veritable fever of longing to pene- 
trate its mysteries. 

It did not occur to her to ask any one 

to translate it for her, I do not know, 

indeed, whether she would greatly have 

cared to have it translated. What she 

143 



Memoirs of a Child 

wished, and wished with a curious inten- 
sity, was to break for herself through the 
barrier erected by a strange tongue, and 
assert her inalienable right to read that 
which was written. She had known be- 
fore this that there were other languages, 
— languages which she could not under- 
stand, — but this was probably the first 
time that this fact, in concrete shape, ever 
confronted her, and she revolted against 
it. Single-handed and alone, she con- 
tended with the outlandish words, bring- 
ing to bear upon them all the light which 
might be reflected by contiguous pictures 
of long-necked ladies and fierce-looking 
gentlemen, attired indifferently in baggy 
trousers, and all in highly emotional atti- 
tudes. But this light was faint indeed. 
Meeting no appreciable reward, her efforts 
slackened; and insensibly her profound 
desire to read this book faded away. The 
one who was the child, however, has yet 
144 



Language 

a deep and thrilling sympathy with those 
who spend laborious days poring over 
nameless characters on hoary bricks and 
immemorial monuments, resolute to pluck 
from them their purport. She too was 
once, in a way, of this guild. 

Of course, her native tongue was, at 
times, a medium almost equally dense 
through which to descry meaning; but 
one would not have that utterly shut-out 
feeling, nor any analogous to it. Occa- 
sional oases of lucidity were enough to 
compensate for extensive deserts of ob- 
scurity ; and even through those deserts 
there not seldom flitted phantasmagoria 
of meaning which were interesting and 
alluring. 

Once, I remember, — probably before 
her own school days began, — somebody 
took her to a school commencement ; and 
a gentleman made a long, long address, to 
which the child listened with respectful 
io 145 



Memoirs of a Child 

attention. The general sound of the words 
was familiar to her, and she was hardly 
aware of the fact that she did not at all 
understand. But all at once he said 
something about a pink sash, and the 
child looked around at the person who 
had brought her, and laughed delightedly. 
She knew what a pink sash was, and she 
knew he was saying that girls liked to 
wear pink sashes ; and oh, how refreshing 
it was! Then and there the child decided 
that it was a very nice speech. 

Her conceptions of import, I repeat, were 
often fantastic enough; but I recall no 
particular embarrassment which came to 
her from misinterpretation of what was 
said to her, or from involuntary Mala- 
propism on her own part ; while I recollect 
more than one small tragedy of pronuncia- 
tion and idiom. 

The precise significance which one at- 
taches to an expression is not always evi- 
146 



Language 

dent, but one's choice of words, and man- 
ner of calling them are patent and unmis- 
takable ; are matters for " daws to peck 
at." At least it was so in the child's own 
case. Just how grown people said some 
things, she often found it surprisingly hard 
to make out ; whether, for example, they 
said latrobe or batrobe, salt cellar or salt 
setter, long remained uncertain; and she 
oscillated accordingly between the alternate 
expressions — with a leaning toward the 
last, in both instances. 

It was very seldom indeed, so far as I 
can recall, that she referred her problems 
to the omniscience of her elders; for she 
was distinctly shy and sensitive in the 
matter of speech; feeling, I think, in an 
undefined way, that a knowledge of one's 
own tongue is something which comes by 
nature; and that any ignorance of it was 
consequently abnormal and surprising. 
Hence, as a rule, she merely revolved her 
147 



Memoirs of a Child 

difficulties in her own mind, and experi- 
mented guardedly with her conclusions. 

The child did not like to make mistakes ; 
but she did not care to be priggish in her 
English. It was not a mistake, she felt, to 
say raggetty, when all one's friends said 
it ; or bit for it (under certain circum- 
stances), or Hi-spy for I -spy. Sqush and 
squinch were not grown people's verbs, but 
they belonged to the vernacular of her own 
circle, and she employed them unhesitat- 
ingly. The dictionary, of course, said June 
bug and grass-hopper, but custom among 
her contemporaries sanctioned Juney bug 
and hopper -grass ; and the child would 
have disdained so gross an affectation as 
the use of the first -mentioned terms. 

It was eccentricity which she especially 
sought to avoid. But no care, apparently, 
could render one secure against verbal 
tragedy. Surely it was natural to think 
that one's reading-book was an infallible 
148 



Language 

guide, and that one was absolutely safe in 
following it. But once the child prefaced 
some trifling anecdote of school life, which 
she was going to tell, with the classic 
phrase, " Not long since," — and everybody 
laughed ; actually laughed at that ! Every- 
body, that is, but her mother ; who glanced 
at the others in a way the child under- 
stood as well then as she did afterwards. 
Her mother did not want the others to 
laugh. Clearly her mother knew that there 
was nothing funny in saying "Not long 
since," as the reading-book did, but only 
a commendable ambition to conform to 
the best models of expression. It was 
terrible, though, to be laughed at, even 
by the ignorant and unthinking; and the 
child never tried again to import book 
English into private life. 

But even every-day English had its pit- 
falls. Once, for instance, she was off some- 
where with her grandmother, whom she 
149 



Memoirs of a Child 

dearly loved and most implicitly trusted 
(for her grandmother was very good to 
her; one remembers now just how it felt 
to be cuddled in her lap) , and in the yard 
there was a great deal of green grass, which 
it seemed to the child a pity to waste. So 
she crept behind her grandmother, as she 
sat in the porch talking to some other 
ladies, and whispered, " Would it be any- 
thing if I took off my shoes ? " And her 
grandmother said, " It would be something, 
of course!" — said it jestingly, it is need- 
less to say. Perhaps she told her whether 
or not she might take off her shoes, but 
I do not remember. The child was too 
much disconcerted to care in the least about 
that. 

She sat down soberly on the porch steps, 
and thought and thought. She wondered 
what possible way there was of asking about 
the fitness of a thing unless one said, Is it 
anything ? But then everything was some- 
150 



Language 

thing, sure enough ! This should surely be 
conclusive against the phrase. But some- 
how it was not conclusive. Deep down in 
her mind there was an inchoate perception 
that there are expressions which carry their 
own authority with them and laugh at log- 
ical analysis. Anyhow, her heart was hot 
within her. She dimly felt that she had 
not been justly dealt with. And she did 
not care any more about the green grass. 



151 



Memoirs of a Child 



17. Random Recollections 

ON looking back, the scattered mem- 
ories of childhood are merged into 
one galaxy, and may not well be 
resolved into orderly succession. One 
seems, however, to recognise as the most 
distant of all one which is merely that of 
lying on a low bed near an open window, 
in a room with several people in it, who 
were moved, I think, in some way. The 
child must have been about two and a 
half years old — not more certainly — if I 
associate this memory correctly ; of which 
I am by no means sure. 

Another unmistakably very early remi- 
niscence is that of being borrowed by a 
lady and carried by her to spend the day 
at some distant -place, a place almost at 
the end of the street-car line — almost at 
152 



Random Recollections 

the end of the earth, as it seemed to the 
child — and of wearing a very special hair 
ribbon, which afforded her great inward 
satisfaction. It was blue velvet, I think, 
and it was made into a bow and hooked on, 
instead of being just tied on, the bow being 
placed rather on the side, with what the child 
considered very novel and happy effect 
This was really the feature of the day. All 
else has become to the last degree hazy. 

A recollection certainly approaching the 
primordial is that of sitting on one of a 
tier of little benches in the infant class at 
Sunday school, and of artlessly mentioning 
aloud some detail regarding home affairs; 
a procedure which suddenly struck her as 
perhaps bordering upon unconventionally, 
and embarrassed her quite painfully. 

A little later, I suppose, but not much, 

came the well-remembered experience of 

being a little chalky-white statue in one of 

a series of tableaux ; and of standing with 

153 



Memoirs of a Child 

one's eyes shut an unconscionably long 
time, so long that it got to be decidedly 
monotonous ; and so one suddenly opened 
them and looked around, intending after 
the refreshment of this intermission to re- 
sume posing. But one had hardly seen 
more than a bewildering blur of light be- 
fore there was a ripple of laughter, and 
the curtain fell. 

About this time, probably, for the two 
memories are somehow linked, she must 
have first come in contact with death — in 
a shape so gentle that it seemed to her the 
most beautiful thing in the world. A little 
child had died in the house with her, and 
she saw it lying still and lovely, with flowers 
about it and in its little folded hands. 
After that, I remember, the child, for awhile, 
would often shut her eyes, and cross her 
hands upon her breast, and lie motionless, 
playing that she was dead. 

It is only, however, by the aid of internal 
154 



Random Recollections 

evidence that one can supply so much as 
approximate dates to the most vivid even 
of these childish memories, which seem to 
have nothing to do with time. And ytt, 
curiously enough, her seventh birthday 
somehow asserts itself as a landmark — for 
no reason whatsoever that may now be 
discovered. One remembers dimly that 
she rejoiced in the fact of being seven 
years old, as she had previously rejoiced, 
doubtless, in being six and five and four 
and three, and subsequently gloried in 
being eight and nine and ten and eleven, 
and that is all. Whatever it was that made 
the day special, whatever it was that set it 
apart from other birthdays, has passed into 
oblivion. Practically the day has faded to 
a mere colourless date, as the immortal 
Cheshire Cat faded to a disembodied grin. 
Why in this instance there should be chro- 
nology without history, and in other cases 
history without chronology, it would be 
155 



Memoirs of a Child 

quite vain to wonder. One can only accept 
the fact as one of the many whimsicalities 
of memory. 

One then can only say, Once upon a 
time such and such a thing was. " Once 
upon a time " was to the child the best of 
all dates ; unforgettable, sufficiently definite, 
and instinct with all manner of delectable 
suggestion. What that was as a past tense, 
"some of these days" was as a future — 
purple phrases both from the vernacular of 
dreamland. 

The child never thought of linking the 
magic words " once upon a time" with any 
account of her own experiences, the simple 
adverb "once" suiting better with such 
modest happenings than a prelude of such 
delicious promise. But anything, she was 
aware, might happen. Thrilling potentiali- 
ties of every kind, painful and pleasant, 
were upon every side, and vividly present 
to her imagination. 

156 



Random Recollections 

One day her drawing teacher, warning 
her against an undue dependence upon her 
rubber, said to her, " What would you do 
if you were cast on a desert island, and 
had n't any rubber ? " This made the child 
seriously consider. For being cast on a 
desert island was to her by no means a re- 
mote contingency. What was more com- 
mon than for people to be cast on desert 
islands — in books? One might almost 
think that people went to sea for no other 
purpose. Certainly they could have gone 
for none which would have been more 
productive of pleasure for the child, who 
loved books of adventure as much as any 
boy of them all. 

It was, probably, with a latent idea of 
the usefulness of such an accomplishment 
on desert islands and in trackless forests 
(which were also very possible destinations ; 
as witness The Swiss Family Robinson and 
The Forest Exiles) that the child tried long 
157 



Memoirs of a Child 

and laboriously to acquire the art of mak- 
ing a fire by rubbing two sticks together, 
after the alleged Indian manner; in the 
feasibility of which her faith gradually 
weakened. 

But the child was not the stuff, per- 
haps, of which illustrious castaways are 
made. One day, I recollect, she ran off 
by herself and climbed a slim, tall, little 
tree, by the aid of an adjacent fence. It 
was a hard tree to climb, straight and in- 
hospitable; so she felt pleased and trium- 
phant as she stood in the " crotch," holding 
on tightly and looking about her. The 
next day she was going home, and possibly 
she had been unwilling to leave this feat 
unachieved, and so had run off to make 
one last attempt. At any rate, she was 
alone, and suddenly became awe-struck and 
lonesome in the great silent landscape, 
under the vast, empty sky. She deter- 
mined to come down. But the ground 
158 



Random Recollections 

appeared to have sunk to a frightful depth 
beneath her, and the fence seemed to have 
withdrawn itself quite beyond reach. De- 
scent without assistance was clearly im- 
possible, and assistance was out of the 
question, for nobody knew where she was. 
Obviously she must pass the rest of her 
life up in that tree, cut off from family 
and friends. No maxims of philosophy, 
no ingenious devices for mitigating her 
misfortune, occurred to her. She stood 
panic-stricken, overwhelmed with dejection. 
Memory leaves her thus. One can only in- 
fer that in some way rescue came to her. 

Interest quite as painful attaches in rec- 
ollection to an experience of a wholly 
different order. She was at a little country 
church, sitting at the outer end of a pew 
near the door. The day was warm and the 
child restless. Across the aisle from her 
was a water bucket, with a long- handled 
cocoa-nut-shell dipper in it. The water 
159 



Memoirs of a Child 

was so clear that the grain of the wood 
showed through it to the bottom, and one 
seemed to see how cool it was. It would 
be very nice, the child thought, to have 
some water — especially out of that in- 
teresting cocoa-nut-shell dipper. Then it 
would be very fascinating to drink in 
church. It was such a little, informal 
church, it would surely be nothing remark- 
able if one slipped over to the water and 
helped one's self. Why should it have 
been put there, if not for people to drink ? 
A spirit of adventure took possession of the 
child. " S'pose " she should go over there 
and drink ! She wondered how it would feel 
to do such a thing. And then she did it. 

It felt very strange indeed, but the eyes 
of the other children, she knew, were fixed 
upon her and it behooved her to justify 
her course by sang-froid and self-posses- 
sion. She dipped up a clear and delicious- 
looking draught in the long-handled dipper 
160 



Random Recollections 

and raised it to her lips; and just then, 
alas, without premonition or warning, she 
found herself convulsed by a fit of agon- 
ised, helpless, albeit subdued, giggling, not 
unattended by symptoms of strangulation. 
With a burning face she stole back to her 
seat to face the condemnatory glances of 
her peers, — for there seems to have been 
that day an unaccountable absence of adult 
surveillance. I do not know that she ever 
went back to that church. Never willingly, 
1 am certain. 

It is noticeable how large a place the 
country occupies in memory a place out 
of all proportion to that which belonged 
to it in actual experience; a fact due, of 
course, to the mind's especial susceptibility 
to impression under circumstances in any 
degree unfamiliar. 

The country even arrogates to itself 
things common to both city and country. 
Night, for instance, belongs almost wholly 
ii 161 



Memoirs of a Child 

to the latter. Regarding night at home 
memory is so silent that one might almost 
think there was "no night there." I re- 
member, indeed, only the Christmas eve 
night already referred to; and with that 
there is no association of darkness. On 
the other hand, one may close one's eyes 
now and see almost with the effect of 
actual vision how, in the country, the sky 
would grow gray behind the darkening 
close -set trees at the foot of the lawn, and 
bring out in their tops great frowning, 
upturned faces which the child hated. 

Partly to shut out those unpleasant giant 
profiles, the child would often turn around 
and rest her head on the step behind her 
with her arm for a pillow, when she and 
the other children were gathered on the 
front porch steps waiting for supper. — 
Supper in the country was very late, almost 
in the middle of the night, it seemed to the 
child. But it was very nice when it came. 
162 



Random Recollections 

— Sometimes when she was comfortably 
turned away from the faces in the trees, 
it came unexpectedly soon ; so soon that 
she would not understand that it had come 
until some friend would shake her by the 
shoulder, and tell her very loudly and in- 
sistently that supper was ready and every- 
body had gone in: then the child would 
gd up hastily, feeling obscurely ruffled, and 
blink very much when she came into the 
lamplight. 

I do not in the least recollect the degree 
of light or darkness which would be in her 
bedroom at home when she would fall 
asleep. Away from home, I know, the 
lamp would be extinguished as a prelimi- 
nary to repose (a singularly irrational pre- 
liminary, it seemed to the child); and one's 
eyes would instantly open very wide and 
watch the thick, palpitating blackness for 
awhile, with unwinking vigilance and in- 
tense suspicion ; though, before long, with- 
I63 



Memoirs of a Child 

out one's knowledge or consent, one's lids 
would treacherously close in the very face 
of danger. 

The child would spend the night some- 
times with some small cousins of hers, who 
were accustomed to sing a little song when 
the lamp was taken away about not being 
afraid in the dark ; and the child would 
sing too, but with serious mental reserva- 
tion. For she was afraid in the dark ; but 
while she was singing she was not quite 
so much afraid. Sometimes the dark was 
more terrible than at other times. One 
particular night in the country, I remember, 
she felt that she really could not endure it. 
So she squeezed her lids together, and tried 
desperately to go to sleep before the lamp 
should be put out ; tried with an intensity 
of effort that made her abnormally wide- 
awake, and more quiveringly alive than 
ever to the ensuing inkiness, and all that 
might be lurking in it. 
164 



Random Recollections 

Memory, I repeat, shows things de- 
tachedly, and with small regard to natural 
order. One cannot, for example, at all 
determine just where in her experience 
belongs what seems to have been her first 
clear recognition of the grim fact of mortal- 
ity. The closed eyes and folded hands of 
the little child whom she saw lying in 
flower-strewn loveliness, brought to her, as 
I have intimated, no real idea of death. It 
was long afterwards, I think, measuring in 
consonance with the brief span of child- 
hood, that this came to her. It came to 
her curiously. A tiny peach-tree had sprung 
up in the yard at her home, and the child 
had " spoken for it." So it was hers, and 
she loved it almost as if it had been a 
sentient thing. When, therefore, some- 
body one day told her that her peach-tree 
was going to die the child v/as startled 
and distressed. A wild idea of some sud- 
den blight occurred to her, and she flew 
165 



Memoirs of a Child 

to investigate. But no; there stood the 
little green switch, apparently in full health 
and vigour. Still the person who had 
spoken to her persisted that it was going 
to die. What did it mean ? How did 
anybody know that it was going to die? 
Her anxious questions at last elicited the 
terse reply, " Everything is going to die ! " 

The identity of the philosophic spirit who 
figured in this incident is now lost, and of 
the peach-tree recollection presents no fur- 
ther trace, but almost like an impression 
of yesterday remains the sudden sense of 
universal insubstantiality, of relentless, all- 
embracing doom. All that the child had 
known seemed to melt away from her, and 
to leave her standing in a vast vacuity. 
A profound impersonal sadness enveloped 
her like a gray mist. What did anything 
matter ? Everything was going to die ! 

Whatever formal assent there may previ- 
ously have been to the proposition, All men 
166 



Random Recollections 

are mortal, and this visible frame of things 
is ever hasting to decay, this, I feel sure, 
was her first vital contact with the idea. 
And yet, even in this case, one may be 
mistaken. For memory seems sometimes 
to have taken from the past at random 
almost, — choosing and rejecting, as from 
mere caprice, among things that present 
no obvious ground of difference. 

Certainly the child had countless happy 
moments; but one isolates itself from all 
the rest, and defies forgetfulness. It was 
in the country. The child and the other 
children were playing some romping game 
on the smooth green lawn, under the great 
oaks; the sun was setting; and the child's 
mother, in a beautiful white dress, was on 
the porch, not far off. And all at once, as 
by the sudden waking of some new sense, 
the child knew that she was utterly happy. 
This stands out with curious distinctness as 
the supreme moment of all childhood. 
167 



Memoirs of a Child 



Conclusion 

UPON the whole, there is nothing to 
tell of the child that in interest and 
importance may not be matched in 
the history of any child. Nothing in partic- 
ular happened to her ; she did nothing at 
all remarkable; and not even any espe- 
cially sparkling gems of infantile wit and 
wisdom remain to her credit. The thoughts 
and feelings which were hers find their 
analogues, I think, in the minds of all 
children ; else it would not have seemed at 
all worth while to consider them even thus 
slightly. 

The child, I know, would have winced 
and shrunk to have had the veil lifted even 
so far as it has been lifted, upon her inner 
life, — upon her naive tastes and fancies, 
her crude reflections, her petty perturb- 
168 



Conclusion 

ations, her idle and fantastic dreams. For 
one sees, in looking back, that, with all her 
laughing speech, she was in reality most 
reticent, reticent to a degree that makes 
one marvel. 

And so one is half remorseful toward 
the child, — is moved by an impulse of 
apology. For the child, as one thinks of 
her, is not at all one's self but a small 
personage who was — once upon a time — 
and who bequeathed to one her memories. 
For the sake of these one feels toward her 
a curious remote tenderness, — for the sake 
even of the trifles which she garnered. 
But there are things not trifles also, things 
human and divine, still too sacred for any 
words. 



169 



AUG 15 1903 



